Poems & poem-like things – Page 1046

June 21, 2004May 30, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Night

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Honduran poetry

Dibujo uno
de Claudia Torres (Mariposa Amarilla / Yellow Butterfly, Ediciones Navegante, Austin, TX, 1996)

La tarde teje su silencio
en los pequeños bordes de las casas.
Esconde aristas abruptas
al son de la noche espesa.

Las vigas abrazan las soleras y sus tejas.
El amarillo de los rayos se encoge
hasta volverlas nada.

El ovillo azul intenso
se convierte en zumbido titilante,
suspira la luz de la mañana.

El ojo anhela;
apenas un reflejo en la profundidad interna
que batalla los sentidos.

El miedo salta victorioso.
Hace suyo el momento.
Tiembla, treme, tiembla.

El susurro es un largo grito sin ruido.
__________

Sketch #1

Evening weaves its silence
along the narrow borders of the houses.
It conceals sharp edges
with the advancing sound of dense night.

The rafters tighten their grip
on crossbeams, roof tiles.
The last yellow rays dwindle,
return to nothing.

Skein of vivid blue becomes
an arousing hum, the light
of morning on its breath.

The eye hungers:
scarcely a single glimmer
in the deep core
at war with the senses.

Fear leaps up,
overwhelms the moment.
Trembling, quaking, trembling.

A whisper is a long scream without a sound.
__________

Claudia Torres is a linguist and a native of Tegicigalpa, Honduras, born in 1951. In the above poem, I like the images of weaving, and the way its synaesthesia evokes a confusion of emotions perhaps best understood by someone who grew up under a dictatorship, where a midnight knock might mean two, almost opposite things.

Another poem by Torres, “Caballero de Noche / Gentleman of the Night,” includes the following explanatory note: “Gentleman of the Night and Love for a Day are the literal translations of flowers that are common in the author’s native country of Honduras.” This time I’ll put my translation first.
__________

Gentleman of the Night

Shy caresses
all over my skin,
scent of cinnamon,
of guava.

In my tangled hair
there dreams
the dry stroke
of a tender hand.

Gentleman of the night,
love for a day,
lemon tree in blossom,
unpollinated orchid.

You went away,
and it was killing me.
__________

Caballero de Noche

Sobre de la piel
caricias hurañas,
olor de canela,
guayaba.

En el pelo
enredado sueño
el sonido seco
de una mano tierna.

Caballero de noche,
amor de un día,
limonero abierto,
orquídea fallida.

Te fuiste,
y yo me moría.

June 19, 2004 by Dave Bonta

Time piece

I wrote the following last year, during the doggerel days of August, inspired by a nifty feature on the revamped home page of our local Audubon chapter.

Ode to a Line of Java Code

Holy smoke – upon the monitor, a flock
Of swirling numerals turned into a clock!
They chase the cursor, newly hatched ruffed grouse
Imprinting – as it were – upon the mouse,
But soon enough resume their circle dance,
Spin left or freeze, like children in a trance
Whose ring-around-a-rosie fell from grace –
Transformed by warp of time and cyberspace.

June 17, 2004 by Dave Bonta

Malinche, A.D. 1522

No rain of flowers marked my entry into the world.
I wasn’t born onto a shield or draped
in a robe of feathers. My own mother
sold me in secret & celebrated my funeral
with the substituted corpse of a slave.
I ended up serving the lords of Yucatán,
on the eastern shore.

Four years ago, when Hernán Cortez came back
from setting fire to his ships, slipping
like a thief into camp, I was waiting in
his tent. We understood each other
from the first, before I could speak
one phrase of Castillian. We had
the same hungers.

He is the blonde lightning, I am the thunderhead.
The eagle dives, the jaguar screams — or so
the lying poets like to say. I hear
only the cries of men sliding
in their own gore, moaning for
their mothers. A thousand times
the fate of empires rode on almost nothing
but my supple tongue.

When we fled Tenochtitlan the first time
& our portable bridge failed, the drowned bodies
of soldiers weighed down with plundered gold
filled that last, terrible gap in
the great causeway. Over such fords
have these legions of freed slaves wallowed,
swum, returned.

Freely I chose to serve the foreign occupiers
& their three-faced God Who is Father,
Mirror, Smoke. He bleeds Himself so
the rest of us might be spared, redeems
all captives. For the sake of faith
His double-edged words sever children
from parents, wives from husbands,
a people from their blood-soaked earth.
For love!

Here, Mother. Take the jewelry from around
my neck. All’s well that ends.
I am called Marina now: the fleet
burning in the harbor. That watchword.
That perilous crossing.

June 10, 2004 by Dave Bonta

Bathroom poems

Surveys show that the most often remodeled part of the modern American dwelling is the bathroom. Clearly, we love our bathrooms. So shouldn’t we be celebrating them in verse?

Here’s a poem I wrote several years ago (included in my manuscript Spoil), followed by thirteen shorter pieces I came up with just now. The whole collection might be entitled . . .

THRONE ROOM DIVAN

Deconstruction Site

To think they were back there
all that time someone said

meaning the half-dozen snakes
of three different species
our bathroom remodeling project displaced

but my own thoughts kept dwelling
on that huge nest of razor blades
in the wall where the mirror had been

We propped up the roof and ripped
the bathroom walls out
keeping the fixtures intact
so that the shower stall
stood fully exposed
to the breeze and blowing rain
for half that summer

Ah
whatever else might happen
in this lifetime I’ll never have
a better bathroom

***

A small turd floats
in the otherwise clean toilet bowl
like a persistent doubt.

***

My new low-flush toilet
is less than commodious.
Every morning I register
a fresh complaint.

***

Her brand-new bathroom’s
feng shui is perfect:
the floor-to-ceiling mirror
fogs up immediately.

***

Not to sound callous, but
what I remember most is
how large & soft her guest
towels were.

***

The old guy in the rest stop’s
ultra-modern men’s room takes
a long time zipping up,
stands there looking all over
for something to push.

***

The graffito might just
as well have read,
“Everybody Meditates.”

***

I sat on the crapper eating a sandwich.
Hey, it happens.

***

In the men’s room at the public library
someone reeking of body odor
moaned & howled with abandon
in the only stall.
I pissed as quietly as I could.

***

Why would anyone name a kid “John”?
He’ll get shat on, his girlfriend will write
to tell him she’s found someone else,
he’ll end up paying
for anonymous sex.

***

Across from the toilet
in a spider web near the floor
a trapped millipede coils, uncoils.

***

Three million households in New York City
and every one has an intermittent stream
flowing through it.

***

At the back-to-nature jamboree
hundreds of kids independently decided
to go squat in the creek
when they had to potty.

***

If I ever install a composting toilet,
I’ll have to get one of those
New Age desktop fountains with
the little pebbles in it.

***

The old privy.
A turd falls in.
No sound of water.

June 4, 2004 by Dave Bonta

Chasing shadows

Like a grain of sand added to time,
Like an inch of air added to space,
or a half-inch,
We scribble our little sentences.

Charles Wright, Appalachia (FSG, 1998)

For some time I’ve been chewing on an old bone of contention between artists and critics: is the image older than the symbol? I think yes. I remember Borges, not too long before his death, folded into his very tweedy jacket and staring sightlessly out at the fawning audience. The auditorium was packed for his evening lecture, which, he had said earlier in the day, he wished to be a discussion – but who was kidding whom? – about metaphor. Funny how an image stick in one’s head, the Chinese graduate student wrote in his spiral-bound notebook. (Penn State got them from the mainland even then; they stood out from other East Asian students with the bathroom slippers they wore everywhere.) Speaking through his interpreter, our honored guest discussed his favorite contention, that Life is a Dream. “But isn’t that itself a metaphor?” one of our more alert members of the faculty of the College of Liberal Arts wanted to know. “No,” Borges intoned to the delight of many, who found said faculty member a little hard to take. “It is the truth!”

This would have been a scandalous notion had it come from anyone but the Great Writer. There was a bit of murmuring, to be sure. I remember murmuring something myself; I’m not sure what. “Freud have mercy!” perhaps, or “Pinch me!” But up spoke another of our champions to ask for an example of a poetic image with no metaphorical function. “Consider Japanese haiku,” said Borges. “‘The ancient pond. A frog jumps in. The sound of water.’ Where’s the metaphor?” “Couldn’t you say the entire poem functions as a metaphor?” “You could, but it isn’t necessary. The poem doesn’t have to mean anything.” Japanese – ancient pond, mean nothing, wrote the Chinese grad student in the seat beside me.

I am oversimplifying as usual; you don’t have to tell me that. Symbols and metaphors aren’t exactly the same. But I find it interesting to try and imagine how the brain of an intelligent, social, non-human animal such as a dog or raven actually works, how it might see the world. Because of course the one big difference between us and the others is their lack of a symbolic language. No abstractions! But dreams, memory, emotion, anticipation, basic reasoning power – they have all that.

Well, the image that sticks in my head is of Fred First’s one year-old dog Tsuga chasing – or perhaps attempting to herd – the shadows of butterflies. He also bobs for rocks. There’s something awfully darn metaphorical about a blogger’s dog chasing the shadows of butterflies. Is he a literalist, I wonder, or a skeptic? It is equally easy to imagine him saying: “The Butterfly listeth where it will,” or: “I don’t believe in Butterfly. I know what I see.”

But I’m just being clever, as humans are wont to do. There’s enough meat there already without any help from me.

The retriever pup
chases butterfly shadows
even in his sleep.

Butterfly’s shadow:
the dog’s nose goes wild
at the lack of odor.

Muzzle to ground,
his legs get ahead of him:
herding shadows.

Butterfly shadow
on the lawn shrinks, vanishes.
The dog digs for it.

Head under water
the golden retriever
keeps his eyes open.

On the creek bottom
every pale stone’s alive with shadows.
Delicious!

June 1, 2004May 26, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Some notions about peonies

Peonies open only to fill with rain.
Lightweights, they quickly reach their limit
and set their inverted cups down in the dirt.

In their native East
when peonies bow
does the gardener bow back?
I look for Mecca in every direction,
envy the ground beetles
these censers spilling over
for no one. With legs uncrossed
I medidate upon the absence
of thorns.

Perhaps we should regard the bud as the main event: asteroid no realer than the dominion of the Little Prince, light green and each day more shot with pink – like a nugget of April smuggled into June. Outpost for a troupe, a squadron of small black ants whose duties evidently involve unstinting circumambulation.

And how directly this tumescence suggests to a student of human sexuality some alternate node of climax, some new biological imperative that the blind hand of evolution even now is groping toward, a focus of higher feeling a la Teilhard de Chardin – if not indeed the very apotheosis of erotica as pioneered or even invented (we are led to believe) by the French in general.

But this of course is just the sort of analogy their sloppier thinkers prefer – sex calling to sex across the divide between arbitrary “kingdoms” – while in fact the peony’s too prim to take part in any insurgency. More Hagia Sophia than pleasure dome, its dark leaves a jacquerie of pikes in pageant only, tough roots rumored to hold an antidote to melancholy – itself a narcotic for believers of a Manichaean bent. I’d often wondered what had become of it, that lovely funk I used to fall into each spring when the trees had finished retaking their four fifths of the sky, a recoiling, a hunkering down that used to blunt the sharp corners and muffle every bright and eager note. And when the fog finally lifts there’s a New World in diminuendo, growing ever softer and more diffuse, settling almost imperceptibly on its much too slender stem.

Now the thrushes have gathered
to sing on the sprigs without thinking:
how could you hear their song in the trees
and not be glad with all you’ve got and start drinking?

What could be better than branches renewed
by time, with buds peeking
into the garden? When a wind comes on
they nod to each other, it seems, as though they were speaking.

Solomon Ibn Gabirol (11th century), translated by Peter Cole

There are those who put
words into the mouths
of every flower: poets,
lovers and lawyers.
I resolve to stop
right here, to go
and listen.

May 29, 2004March 16, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Afternoon of a fawn

I’ll be gone until at least Monday. Happy Decoration Day, y’all.

I watched an indigo bunting on
the topmost branch silhouetted
against the sky: blue
& still more blue. If I told you
all I could see was the yellow of
his bill, would you believe me?

In the bare crown of the elm tree
where a porcupine gnawed all winter,
a hummingbird perches with his back
to an indigo bunting. How odd to see him
sit so still so long, I think, though
his head pivots back & forth the whole
time. The bunting calls & calls.
Could this battered tree with
its foliage like a crazy woman’s skirt
hide two nests? A crow flies sideways,
silent, against the wind.

Putting the chili to simmer, I walked into the dining room and found a bat – some myotis, probably little brown – hanging between the storm windows. The sun shone full on its scrunched up face. I left a note on the table and went for a walk, chased down the unfamiliar whine of 17-year cicadas in the corner of the field, looped into the woods. A hen turkey took off from her nest among the ferns. Looking for the eggs, I found instead a nest in a barberry bush with three naked purple nestlings. A towhee scolded from the next bush. Jesus, I thought, what next? Then cutting back across the meadow I almost stepped on the head of a newborn fawn.

Two hours later when my eight year-old niece returns from town I lead her to the spot, tramping behind me through the thistles in her sandaled feet, too impatient to put shoes on. The fawn’s still there, curled up like a question mark. Its dark eyes blink. We are its first two humans, I tell Eva, this is the first afternoon of its life. Eva explains all about hunters, miming the crouch, the bang, her voice getting louder & louder, pointing an imaginary rifle at its heaving ribs. The wet black nostrils flare & quiver with the strangeness of our scent.

May 27, 2004 by Dave Bonta

Half-assed sonnet

HORRORS POETICA

Another batch of bad poems consigned
To the bottom drawer
After a last quick look to ensure
There’s no rare find:
No gleam that isn’t pyrite,
No notion I could inflate in-
To an idea, no image that might straighten
Up and fly right
Off the page. And yet
These stillborn ones so outnumber
The survivors, I can’t forget
Them. May they forever slumber
In my mind, all out of season,
Each irreproducible in its unreason.

May 26, 2004 by Dave Bonta

Just-so story

“It’s all so tightly regulated, so professional and commercial now,” he sighs, remembering his wild days of wrestling lions and grappling with live boa constrictors in the depths of the Guatemalan jungle.
–interview with former Tarzan actor Herman Brix in The Christian Science Monitor

Liana, liana. Lovely on the tongue & in the mind’s jungle. Reaching obliquely for the yellow flowers & the crown, dark slash between lines of verse transcribed as prose, dropping fat figs to lure the parrots & howler monkeys, in whose bowels will gestate the insidious seeds that want to hover up there like UFOs & send their landing gear down in the form of lianas.

Wait, bear with me! Soon enough I’ll completely hedge the host tree in: a real live tree fort. And having given such generous support the tree dies as conveniently as Jack’s beanstalked giant. Because as the free marketeers proclaim, in the jungle it’s grow or die. The slime molds & fungal mycelia colonize the heartwood, soon followed by hordes of miners–whole companies of ants, grubstaking beetles & bees. And after the bottom falls out there’s room for a menagerie of snakes & bats & spiders in this hollow column shot through with light from the chinks in the lattice-work of what once had been such pliant vines–yet even then had been strong enough for a New World figleafed Tarzan & a clinging Jane to swing from, so lithe, so blithely unaware of how (for example) the black jaguar got its spot, or where the guerrillas learned how to lord it over the ranks of high society. And this, for the curious, is the story of the strangler fig, which is also delicious.

May 16, 2004September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

In the month of small flies

In the month of small flies and the sharp & bitter leaves of wild mustard, a hair fell from heaven & flipped & spun & turned by stages into the first hornbeam tree. But not right away: for a time it slipped in & out of small clearings, walking with a bit of a limp. The people at that time were living in lean-tos made from hemlock boughs & old, yellowed newpapers. Easy come, easy go, they used to whisper whenever a hard rain brought the roof down on their heads. Half-forgetful of his origins, the old man took to carrying stones from the creek, mixing grayish mud with sand. He had fallen in love with the song of a sparrow no one had ever noticed before, and had decided to devote the rest of his life to its study. Meanwhile, pink lady’s slipper orchids in mossy thickets exposed themselves to deluded bees. Black cherries bloomed with a scent as cloying as prom queens. Wherever one stepped, something hopped out of the way & looked back over its shoulder with a reproachful gaze. One heard the peepers down by the pond, the toads around the spring & up on the hill the solitary tree frogs, trilling as if it meant something.

Around this time somebody noticed that none of the calendars showed the days of the week the way they always had. It was as if a long-ago ramp festival-cum-revival meeting took off like a hundred helicopters and swept every last Monday into the forgotten corners where only children playing hide-and-seek ever go. Unless, in fact, the calendars had simply begun to look a great deal like weathered boulders, all decked out in clubmoss and rock tripe. The old man’s skinny arms grew hard as antlers, and his skin turned gray because he shunned direct sunlight. The sparrow – if that’s what it was – had taken to nesting behind his left ear, because it was warm there & out of the wind. There was an almost inaudible rhythm, a pulse that could’ve been the sound of the surf or a woodpecker thinking about his next composition.

Ultimately, the decision to put down roots is more than mere decision, said the hornbeam tree as its nondescript buds unfurled nondescript leaves. We would all do well to heed such a sense of urgency more wordless than love. A true spirit guide never says what you want to hear, & sooner or later leaves you on the lurch. That night, they say, will be a dark one. But is it too much to ask for, this feeling of intimate involvement in the unfolding of others’ destinies? You wake up from a dream in which the only two women you have ever loved have found each other, lose themselves like mirrors turned face to face with nothing, not a speck of dust to come between them: that bottomless ocean.

You wake up & it’s all true, tears of joy – if that’s the word – run down your cheeks. And you remember how every hundred years a mischievous bodhisattva brushes the side of the mountain with a fly whisk, anticipating its ultimate disintegration into the everythingness of Nevermind. We might well expect a different kind of measure to drive the mountain’s own slow symphonies.

The old man’s unfinished house should serve in the meantime – not that anyone needs very much where founding myths are concerned. A sharp digging stick & the ears of a night watchman, little else. But this day that used to be a day of rest has brought the finest weather we’ve seen in a month of Sundays. There’s no time, no time for this foolishness! The pancakes will be on in two minutes!

Submitted for the Ecotone Wiki topic, “Time and Place”