Poems & poem-like things – Page 1134

March 6, 2007 by Dave Bonta

The Hokey-Pokey

An enormous army-green helicopter squats on the roof. We pass through the hokey-pokey checkpoint, revolving in a kind of dance with our hands above our heads, praise the Lord. That’s what it’s all about. Then echoey corridors, the squeak of new boots. Craning my head to peer through a skylight, I see HONDURAS still etched into one of the battlements. I know I have nothing to fear, but keep my thoughts to myself in any case, sitting in silence at the desk I’ve been issued, or dividing up an enormous baked squash with a butter knife as if it were a pie, as if it were a circle only temporarily stretched out of shape. The orange meat crumbles as the blade passes through. Nobody here can eat another bite. The busboy fumbles with something under his fatigue jacket & my mouth goes dry: in another moment we will be filled with shards of metal and foreign flesh. If I’m lucky, I’ll live out my life with fragments of the enemy lodged in my side. I will turn myself around.
_______

Note: According to the OED, hokey-pokey (or hokey-cokey in the UK) comes from hocus pocus, the all-purpose conjuror’s formula dating back to the early 17th century. The nonsense Latin is popularly believed to derive from hoc est (enim) corpus (meum), “this is my body” — the words spoken when the priest elevates the consecrated host, marking the moment of transubstantiation. An 18th-century abbreviation of hocus pocus gave us the word hoax.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t know any of this when I wrote the first draft.

March 2, 2007March 5, 2020 by Dave Bonta

The Pleasures of a Book: Francis Ponge

Francis Ponge book The Nature of Things, by Francis Ponge

Translated and with an Introduction by Lee Fahnstock

New York: Red Dust, 2000 (2nd printing)

Originally published as Le parti pris des choses
by Editions Gallimard Paris, 1942

Poems crowd into the meager paperback like moss on a stone: the book teems. Its ink and glued binding give off a faint odor of fermentation. The margins are scandalously narrow, and the shorter poems don’t even get a page to themselves. Often they lack the most rudimentary spaces between their stanzas, and poorly reproduced engravings are the only illustrations.

But what fecundity! The French originals linger somewhere close by, like shed undergarments littering the floor around a marriage bed. And between these thin covers, everything is in flux, surrendering to multiple readings — at first slow and tentative, then gradually more assured. The off-white paper takes on a greenish cast, like the base of a flame. Fire or ferment, some kind of oxidation is clearly taking place, beyond the normal decomposition that disorders the senses after a good, long read.

Entering a poem by Francis Ponge, we become conscious of the way our thoughts take on the shape of whatever they encounter, though never as a mere vegetal clone. Eyes and lips no less than tongues serve as reproductive organs for the mind. To a poet like Ponge, there could never have been more than one poem in existence at a time. It’s we readers who are to blame for this profligacy: it’s our throats that burn, it’s our paper bodies that are spent.

As for the book, it will not lie flat. The moment I remove my fingers, it springs back to its original position: shut tight, but for the slight gap of the top cover.

February 23, 2007March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Another shell

This is a test of the Audio Player plugin for WordPress. (Feed and email subscribers will need to click through to the site to see the player, I think.) I’m reading a simple little poem I wrote last April, In a Nutshell.

[audio:http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/1/5/600283/In_a_Nutshell.MP3]

I don’t necessarily plan to abandon Odeo just yet, but it’s been a little buggy lately and I wanted another option in case it deteriorates further. Like the wren in the poem, I don’t want to leave anything to chance.

February 7, 2007September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Good Morning Blues

As the months wore on
it began to fade, the once-
sharp contrast between
our skins & hair & lips,
as we knew it would.
Our rubbing together
built up less & less
of a static charge.
The pale apple on the back
of her laptop no longer
reminded me of anything
in particular, & we traded
fewer glances over
the rims of our cups.
For me, the morning paper
became a cosy crib
to wake up in, gazing
through bars of ink
at something like a moon-
lit yard — colorless,
fuzzy with possibilities —
as it slowly shrank
into the hard day.

__________

I stole the title but not much else from the traditional song. I’m most familiar with Leadbelly’s version, which begins with a spoken line: “Never was a white man had the blues, ’cause, nothing to worry about.” Street musician Arvella Gray performs a more light-hearted “Good Morning Blues” at Chicago’s Maxwell Street Market in this video.

February 5, 2007November 25, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Supreme Ultimate Fist

Taipei, 1986

4:30 a.m. & the foreign devils
are staggering home, loud
on the otherwise deserted avenues
where only sixteen
hours earlier, tanks
& missiles had crawled,
draped in flowers,
& floats bristled
with stooped dignitaries
holding each other up
like cigarette butts in
a crowded ashtray.
One flatbed bore a small
plane from the mainland,
complete with defector
waving stiffly from the cockpit,
smiling that smile
that drives
the expats crazy.

Now the Chiang
Kai-Shek Memorial
glows all alone in
the darkness. A taxi
approaches, head & arm
protruding from
the rear window,
obscene fist extended
with a howl:
Fuck you & your 4000
years of civilization!
While two blocks away
in the unlit park,
dozens of shadowy figures
are just beginning
to move the tips
of their fingers.
__________

The title is a common, albeit poor, English translation of Tai Chi Chuan (太極拳)

January 29, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Fashions

Three months after their October debut,
the spring fashions have arrived,
as mysterious as ever.
A store-window mannequin
clutches the hem of her cocktail dress,
an expression of frightened vulnerability
painted on her bone-white face.
Out here, it’s hard to tell women
from men in January’s unisex garb:
dark parkas, hats covering half
their heads. They walk briskly,
no time for window-shopping.
I pull my fingers out of
the finger-holes in my gloves
& ball them into fists for warmth.
I think of my gardener friends
starting their flats of tomato seeds,
filling their houses with the smell
of baked earth.
__________

the smell of baked earth – Actually, most gardeners these days probably just buy sterilized potting soil, but when I was a kid we always used to get soil from the garden during a thaw and bake it in the oven to kill the weed seeds.

Don’t forget to check out the growing collection of posts for the theme “Come Outside” at the always-fashionable qarrtsiluni.

January 29, 2007May 30, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Tree questions

Today is the deadline to send tree- and forest-related links in for the upcoming Festival of the Trees. Email your submissions to kelly (at) ginkgodreams (dot) com, with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line.

I just opened up my copy of Pablo Neruda’s El libro de las preguntas (The Book of Questions, a bilingual edition from Copper Canyon, with translations by William O’Daly) at random, and found this:

Cuánto dura un rinoceronte
después de ser eternecido?

Qué cuentan de nuevo las hojas
de la reciente primavera?

Las hojas viven en invierno
en secreto, con las raíces?

Qué aprendió el árbol de la tierra
para conversar con el cielo?

I can’t improve on Daly’s translation:

How long does a rhinoceros last
After he’s moved to compassion?

What’s new for the leaves
of recent spring?

In winter, do the leaves live
in hiding with the roots?

What did the tree learn from the earth
to be able to talk with the sky?

El libro de las preguntas bears a strong, if superficial, resemblance to the 4th-century B.C. Chinese work Tian Wen, “Questions of Heaven” (which are really questions for heaven, though I’d be the first to agree that there’s something divine about the impulse to raise difficult questions). It too features riddles without answers, such as:

ç„‰ æœ‰ çŸ³ æž—? Yan you shi lin?
ä½• ç?¸ èƒ½ è¨€? He shou neng yan?

Where do the stones have their forest?
Which animals can talk?*

Of course, both books were written in the absence of internet search engines. I typed “question tree” into Google and found this intriguing sentence: This is a leaf Question in a boolean Question tree and its pointers to boolean operands are null values.

It occurred to me this morning that if I wanted to make the contents and purpose of this blog more readily apparent to first-time visitors, I could replace the Rene Char quote with something like, “Living with the questions.” But that’s not a question, is it?
__________

*I studied classical Chinese in college. I haven’t kept up with it, but the grammar is fortunately quite basic and I haven’t forgotten how to use a Chinese dictionary.

Steven Field did a translation of Tian Wen for New Directions, but I haven’t seen it.

Incidentally, if you see only question marks in front of the Pinyin in the two lines of Chinese above, that’s not me trying to be cute. It means you don’t have Chinese characters enabled in your browser.

January 27, 2007May 30, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Through green glasses

Yesterday was the coldest morning so far this year; all the public schools were on a two-hour delay, and the streets were nearly deserted. I sat at a table in the bookstore window, waiting for one of the music stores to open so I could buy a new harmonica. Long strings of colorful paper cranes hung between me and the street — not quite a thousand of them, but nonetheless intended, I think, as a concrete expression of hope for peace.

I had just picked up a a bilingual selection of poems by the great 17th-century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, translated by Alan S. Trueblood: A Sor Juana Anthology. As I’d remembered from his translation of Antonio Machado, Trueblood is a competent but not very imaginative translator, which is fine for my purposes: I’d prefer to have to struggle through the Spanish, referring to the English only for help with vocabulary.

I opened the book to this sonnet, an indictment of shallow faith:

Verde embeleso de la vida humana,
loca esperanza, frenesí dorado,
sueño de los despiertos intricado,
como de sueños, de tesoros vana;

alma del mundo, senectud lozana,
decrépito verdor imaginado;
el hoy de los dichosos esperado
y de los desdichados el mañana:

sigan tu sombra en busca de tu día
los que, con verdes vidrios por anteojos,
todo lo ven pintado a su deseo;

que yo, más cuerda en la fortuna mía,
tengo en entrambas manos ambos ojos
y solamente lo que toco veo.

After I bought the harmonica, I had a little bit of time to kill before lunch, so I went for a brisk walk. The temperature had risen to perhaps 10 degrees (F), but the sidewalks were still pretty empty. I walked around the west end of town, trying to remember all the front porches on which I had partied at one time or another. I counted twelve. I didn’t feel in the least bit nostalgic, though: that was fun while it lasted, but after a while I felt I had heard just about every conversation it was possible to have while drunk.

I slowed down to admire a line of large sycamore trees. On one of them, some artist had mounted a pair of green eyes — verdes vidrios, indeed! I resolved to attempt a translation, however inadequate, of Sister Juana’s poem.

Green enchantment of every human life,
mad hope, delerious gold fever,
convoluted sleep of the sleepless
where dream and treasure are equally elusive;

soul of this world, leafy senescence,
decrepit fantasy of green
that the happy call today
and the unhappy, tomorrow:

let those who wear green glasses
and see everything just as their desire paints it
chase your shadow in search of a new morning.

For my part, I’ll give fate the greater latitude,
keep eyes in both my hands
and look no farther than I can touch.

January 25, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Snow Supper

While we sat inside eating supper,
the snow came down & filled in all the tracks.
Vole & sparrow tracks on the back steps,
squirrel & feral cat on the lawn,
the wingprints of a hawk. Even
my own tracks from an hour before:
the snow’s feet grew to fit them all.

After supper, I switched on the spotlight
under the gable, went out into the storm
& stood looking up.
Here in between these seeming absolutes —
black above, white below — the mix
is anything but gray.
Black pepper from the islands.
Salt from the encircling sea.

January 16, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Nurse

From my pocket notebook. One morning last week.

I dream of snakes swimming through the air, flinging themselves at me like starving kittens, clinging to my chest & biting my male nipples with fangs too weak to pierce the skin. I wake to fine flakes, widely spaced, sinking like diatoms to the murky bottom of the sky. Three squirrels are following a fourth through the trees at the woods’ edge, a slow-motion chase up & down trunks & across swaying nets of black birch twigs. Female gray squirrels come into heat for eight hours every January. The chase is not to the swift, but to the persistent. Whenever she stops, the closest male inches forward with his snout low against the branch, trembling. I sit watching with my coffee, glad not to be a squirrel. I’m wearing a brand-new turtleneck shirt — black like all the others — & twist & twitch in its unfamilar embrace. The ground slowly acquires a nurse’s uniform.