I am listening for an owl that doesn’t call.
It’s as taciturn as the coyotes whose presence here
we mainly infer from footprints.
Night ripens on the boughs, its blue-black fruit
an antidote to the 24-hour Wal-Mart of the soul
in which I sink.
Reception
In every bowl there’s a howl hidden,
a cracked moon, a watery shiver.
In every glass a palace,
in every pot a broth, a salt,
in every beaker a shriek of frantic molecules:
words that alight in the mind
just before sleep, like birds
coming to roost in that copse
that feeds the wild wood
& its one good bowl.
Advice for Prospective Troglodytes (video)
It’s International Rock-Flipping Day, so I thought I’d try making a poetry video with footage of the underside of rocks, shot this afternoon in the woods above my house. The poem is a couple of years old, and may be found at my online collection Shadow Cabinet.
UPDATE: Here’s the complete list of bloggers who participated in IRFD this year.
Wanderin’ Weeta
The Natural Capital
Fertanish Chatter
Roundrock Journal
Just Playin’ Around
What It’s like on the Inside
KrisAbel
BugSafari
Sofia_Alexandra
Growing with Science
ChickenSpaghetti
NaturalNotes
Yips and Howls
Rock, Paper, Lizard
Outside My Window
The dog geek
Dave Ingram’s Natural History Blog
Unplug Your Kids
ORCA: Observar, Recordar, Crecer y Aprender
Will Rees Fine Woodworking …
The Marvelous in Nature
Pohangina Pete
Ontario Wanderer
Bare Baby Feet
The Homefront Lines
Crazy Maize World
Dr. Omed’s Tent Show Revival
And don’t forget to check the Flickr group, too.
Incantation against McMansion-dwellers
We didn’t get as many submissions of curses for the qarrtsiluni Words of Power issue as I would’ve liked, though we did get a few, and we’ll be running them soon. Here’s a kind of curse I imagine gets muttered a lot these days.
A plague on your unrealestate!
A descent of tent caterpillars, a fleet of mosquitos.
May the neighbors pit-roast goats & ululate.
May the farmer on the far hill
spread liquid manure during your dinner parties.
May termites decimate the fake Tudor half-beams
on your misbegotten horror-scene of a house,
may your drywall get dry rot,
may your lawn turn wild every full moon
& seed the subdivision with beggar-ticks.
May the INS arrest you in broad daylight
for employing undocumented workers
to blow from dawn to dusk
your goddamned leaves.
May you be forced to rake.
Speechless, the video
A video version of my poem from last week. It took about four hours to make, process, and upload a video for a poem that I wrote in twenty minutes.
Speechless
Like the beak of a severed chicken’s head
opening & closing in the dirt beside
the chopping block
while its former companion goes
through all the motions
of real life, I have
no words.
Rain
I scan the sky the way others study
a lover’s face. It is
all I have. Three nights ago when
I went out to urinate,
the smell of rain was so rich I couldn’t
get enough of it.
I turned my face to the invisible sky
& stood there taking
great deep breaths, drawing the strange
air into my nostrils,
& when I went back in my glasses were
so wet I had to grope
for a cloth — swatch of cotton softer
than any skin.
__________
Sorry for my relative absense around here; I’ve been busy with qarrtsiluni stuff.
On the Road to Santiago
My brother had chanted its name for days
until, voilà, it hung
a hundred feet above our astonished faces:
lammergeier, impossible to miss,
the open book of its body so wide
it could be read by the thinnest updrafts,
dark against the clouds —
& us standing by the very rock
that Roland’s sword was said to have split
when he fought the Basques & prepared
a feast for vultures. But this one
with its fully feathered head
& wisp of beard looked nothing like
one of those tonsured carrion-eaters.
We lamented its empty talons,
having fed ourselves on tales
of an expert locksmith
taking the bones one by one up
into the sky & letting them drop
onto some likely rock, there to glean
from the splinters the wine-red
marrow, mother of blood.
We watched it pivot,
rocking in the high wind,
then slide quick as a sword down
that long & boney ridge.
Click on the image to read the other posts in honor of International Vulture Awareness Day and learn why vulture conservation is so vital. Sentence-of-the-day award goes to Charlie at 10,000 Birds:
On the face of it, all this attention for a group of scavenging birds that are fairly universally seen as ugly, quarrelsome, and unkempt, dark reminders of mortality, and definitely not the sort of guests you’d invite to a dinner-party (“We sent the invitations out Mrs Vulture, I know we did — it must just be coincidence that both you and the Hyenas didn’t receive them…”) must seem a little odd (especially to any non-birder who stumbles across IVAD and who had probably assumed that we birders usually celebrate delicacy, beauty or song rather than excrement-coated bags of feathers who spend much of their day with their heads shoved up a rotting corpse).
Cwm
One word, it doesn’t matter which,
can be the pebble that sets off
an avalanche. Careful!
We could be buried until spring,
limbs tangled
under the snowy quilt.
One syllable older than language
can shock the snow awake,
recollecting its true nature:
to flow, to flood.
Listen: the brass bell fastened
to the neck of a sheep
has some other sheep’s tooth
for a clapper.
These noises we make
for each other & through each other,
mouth against throat,
broadcast our position
at every trembling step.
*
Cwm (pronounded “koom”) is a cirque.
Thought I’d try my hand at a love poem for once. Not being in any romantic entanglement actually makes it easier, I think. Hard to achieve the necessary aesthetic distance otherwise.
Stock
By noon, the crickets are back to normal speed, but the honey in the jar retains its new-found stiffness. The cicada chorus swells & dwindles, a metallic surf, & the field hums with bees wallowing through goldenrod. On this coolest of summers, my house has been painted a blinding white, like the bed of a lake that vanished into the clouds, leaving only its salt. I look down: a carrion beetle scuttles over the portico bricks right up to my front door & goes all along the bottom looking for an entrance. Maybe it’s lost, I say to myself. You can’t put too much stock in insects.