Category: Poems & poem-like things

Original poetry, translations and videopoems by the authors of this blog. (See Poets and poetry for criticism, etc.)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

In lieu of listening

This entry is part 18 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the seventh poem in the second section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details.

This poem is set in rural Brittany, where Zweig spent much of the year.

Listening to Bells
by Paul Zweig

I hear bells ringing in the village,
Filling the valley with their deep liquid sound.
They mean that someone has died today…

[Remainder of poem removed 9-24-05]

* * * *

Listening to Owls

      for Yemi

An hour before dawn, two screech owls start calling,
loud & close.
I feel like an involuntary eavesdropper
on someone else’s scandal-ridden version
of our lives. It passes
from ridge to ridge, shivering over the houses
& the thirty-five acres of goldenrod plundered from the woods,
like a truncated version of the same
open wing that descends nightly
all over the world, leaving only a few pinholes
of available light.

The owls start calling with the suddenness
of all terrible descents.
I have just been thinking about the long stretches
of highway I would have to walk
to visit distant friends, how we have quarreled
& quickly, almost effortlessly, made up.
But now I tilt my head back
& gaze at those enormous purported suns,
farther away than their image can travel in a lifetime.

When the owls start calling, it takes me a moment
to realize it isn’t my infant niece wailing
in the back bedroom,
fighting her way free of a bad dream
in that existential solitude before language.
Sometimes screech owls keep to a monotone trill,
but not this morning. It’s all high-pitched peals
with a plunge at the end
& enough tremolo to make me think
of the laughter of the desperately happy –
laughing just to keep from crying,
as they say in the blues –
or delirium tremens, the gone high
turned vicious as a beaten dog.

I listen to the owls & chide myself
for anthropomorphizing, not unlike
Indians who can’t hear an owl call
without remembering their own lost
or inconsolable dead. Who else
could part the air so noiselessly?
Staring down the dark tunnels
of frantic scurrying lives,
the eyes of the ancestors grow big as satellite dishes.
They clack their bills.

But these owls are calling for reasons entirely of their own.
They bear no greater share of blame
for this wild tremor in the human throat,
this stutter of images,
than any other ill-omened
inhabitants of the known world.

This might be a mother & her recently
fledged offspring, I think.
It occurs to me that they call
the way they do – with such brevity & abruptness,
throwing their voices –
because of their own, well-founded fear
of larger owls.
They stop far sooner than I stop listening.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Chant for the Summit of the World Body

unaltered phrases from on-line news sources, via Google News

He wanted a real overhaul for the world body
An urgent overhaul of the world body
Poetically described the world body
A final text to move the world body
A harder line at the world body
Taking the message of Youth Upliftment to the world body
To breathe new life into the world body
To encourage and support the world body
To consider committing the world body
The Palestinians want the world body
President Bush called on the world body
The most sordid and shameful episode in the history of the world body
Washington’s relations with the world body
Would have been unthinkable for the world body
Admission into the world body
“Working methods” within the world body
Acceptance of help from the world body
A more strategic relationship with the world body
A particularly troubled time for the world body
Monday night among members of the world body
Committed to strengthening the world body
Enhancing the capacity of the world body
Reason enough to create the world body
The world body could take action
The world body has had past experiences
The world body is the prime instrument
The world body is possibly too democratic for its own good
The world body is supposed to print and oversee
A document enabling the world body
To undermine the effectiveness of the world body
It should have its own seat in the world body
A “Goodwill Ambassador” for the world body
Deviously appointed to the world body
A second-class citizen at the world body
Has yet to get approval from the world body
A horde of reforms for the world body
The Western Shoshone tribe has asked the world body
To tackle the problems facing the world body
Detrimental to the internal unity of the world body
World Rankings released by the world body
Findings that further tarnish the world body
Sweeping changes to the world body
What larger players have in mind for the world body
Taking Iran before the world body
The Islamic world in the world body
Endorsing the reshaping of the world body
Will also oblige the world body
To regain legitimacy for the world body
What future would await the world body?
The bleeding sometimes never seems to stop, according to the world body

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Above the ears, below the waist

This entry is part 17 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the sixth poem in the second section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details.

Robinson Crusoe’s Notebooks
by Paul Zweig

When I am alone,
the world becomes an erotic dream.
Sex boils in my shoes…

[Remainder of poem removed 9-24-05]

* * * *

John the Baptist’s Final Sermon

Whose tongues tick, whose lips move in whispers
as if to raise lost consonants from the dead?
I am that man just off-stage, in the prompter’s box.
If I find willing ears, they will hear me
the way I see the world: askance.

Madam, I am no Adam, giving creatures their names
while his still-ignorant member wandered in his lap.
Male & female, says the scripture, hermaphroditic
were they made to gambol along the edge
of unpronounceable vision – through dreams, perhaps,
or in the margins of a hand-drawn map.
But then the names leapt like sparks from a campfire,
setting their fur alight, & scorched them into awareness.

We who are among all creatures the most naked:
unto us is given the most excruciating consciousness.
I remember how it burned for weeks, that circumcision.
I remember the crown of an infant’s head, right
at the moment of birth: apple of its mother’s eye, full
to bursting. And an even more pregnant fullness I recall,
among glossalalia & the moving shapes of shadows,
in which this Life was shouted into being.

Whatever is holy is almost unbearable.
One cannot proclaim the Word with unclean lips
or catch more than a glimpse of holy Presence
& expect to live. How could such immensity
restrict itself to a name on the tongue or
an image within the heart, within the head?

But dipped in the waters of rebirth,
the Anointed One prepares his terrible crown.
Everything above the ears becomes a place apart –
& then the whole rest of him, of us, because
for the longed-for future ever to descend,
we are commanded to cleave to just such single-
mindedness, O Salome.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Perfect night

This entry is part 16 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the fifth poem in the second section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details.

Amanita Phalloidus*
by Paul Zweig

To be alone in the woods, poking at the moist odors
For mushrooms, knowing the diffuse sexuality
Which comes after a long rain has soaked the forest floor…

[Remainder of poem removed 9-24-05]
__________

*Zweig apparently means Amanita phalloides, a.k.a. Death Cap. Despite its scientific name, it is not nearly as phallic as the stinkhorns (Phallaceae).

* * * *

Fungal Earth

This afterlife in the upper air
is a form of exile. The forest drips,
oozes, swells like a sponge

while we huddle under
our umbrellas, painfully swollen
with these spores, our names,

waiting for some
transcendent breeze
or the diaphanous touch of a beetle’s under-wing.

But below, in the perfect night of the earth,
we one-eyed men are King.
Sparrows fall into our efficient nets.

With garrote & poison we keep the soil safe
for our charges, whose every eager rootlet
finds its hyphen

until a clot of fungal
flesh encloses
each cell of sunlight.

The forest is our whore,
soliciting godhead
in knots & gnarls,

crossed branches rubbing
each other raw,
excrescencies of wood.

Hardly a flower bud
opens to a bee
without our hosannas.

Our lucky coins shimmer
& turn green
at the bottom of the sky.
__________

Most plants rely on symbiotic relationships with mycorrizal fungi for basic tasks such as water and nutrient uptake and protection from disease and predation; the study of these relationships, including basic taxonomy, is in its infancy.

Many of the more familiar fungi are the primary agents of plant decomposition in forest ecosystems, and they too are turning out to be less plant-like than was traditionally supposed.

Mushrooms, it turns out, are even more interesting than scientists suspected. They know that the colorful forms we call mushrooms are actually the fruiting bodies of fungi and that each one is sustained by miles of microscopic filaments, called hyphae [or, in aggregate, mycelia]. Those hyphae snake through the forest floor and into rotting logs, secreting enzymes that break down complex carbohydrates into the nutritive sugars needed by the mushroom. Such saprophytic mushrooms break down woody materials into soil. Without them, our woods would suffocate in their own debris.

The mycologist George Brown and his graduate students at the University of Guelph in Ontario have recently made more remarkable discoveries about what fungi do. Apparently many of them are not benign saprophytes, but fierce predators which attack and eat the microscopic nematodes, rotifers, amoebas, copepods, and bacteria that share the soil with them. And the ways in which they capture and eat them often have the makings of a horror story – catching them in adhesive nets, crushing them with constricting rings, immobilizing them with toxins and eating them alive, attaching to them like tapeworms, impaling them on spores shaped like grappling hooks, and shooting them with projectiles.

– Marcia Bonta, Appalachian Autumn

Posted on by Dave Bonta

My life as a landlubber

This entry is part 15 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m still reading Paul Zweig, and trying to get back into the spirit of writing poems in response. The following prose piece was sparked by the fourth poem in the second section of Zweig’s Selected and Last Poems, entitled “The Archaeology.” I’ve been in a bit of a confessional mood lately…

1.
My first God was a lake in Maine with a soft mud bottom & plenty of leeches. I am too young to swim, but I love watching my mother, so slow on land, slice efficiently through the small waves while seeming merely to recline on her right side. The lake is large & not to be trifled with. In the winter, it turns to stone, my first desert: a white lid for the dreamless eyes of fish.

2.
I am four and a half. My mother is hugely pregnant, & my older brother & I decide to play a practical joke: I hide myself in the deep grass on the back slope above the pond, while Steve bangs in through the kitchen door: “David’s drowning!” Mom rushes past me, frantic, calling my name. I leap to my feet: “Here I am!” She’s furious.

Later, I sit inside staring numbly out at the grass, wanting to be missed again like that, wishing I could still be hidden there, curled up like a comma in that green sea as the wind moves through.

3.
Oceans with stone beaches, thundering surf. In an old black-and-white photo, we wander at low tide past the iconic cliffs at the Bay of Fundy. Fifteen years later, in Taiwan, Steve & I find ourselves on another beach dotted with stout, wave-gouged menhirs. He swims out to a small island, then hollers back: “Come see the geysers! Hurry, it’s spectacular!”

A typhoon is swirling somewhere off to the east, raising mountainous waves. Somehow I fight my way out, & it’s worth the effort: smoothly sculpted sandstone as if from the desert southwest, undermined by the sea & pocked with hollows just the right size to lie down in, imagining I’m St. Brendan innocently beached on a whale’s barnacled back. Its blowhole shoots spray high into the air with every wave, each time giving rise to the same rainbow.

After a while I hear faint voices from the shore: “Come back! Come back!” I try to obey, but the current is too strong & pulls me sideways, out to sea. My strength quickly dissipates; I go under once, twice, my brother reaches me just before I go down the dreaded third time. “Stop swimming,” he says, “& stand up in the water – there’s a shelf of rock we can rest on.” I quell my panic & feel for the rock with my feet, my chin just barely above the troughs. For the first time, I learn to space my breaths. “Here’s what we’ll do,” he shouts in my ear. “Put an arm around my neck, but don’t strangle me. If I paddle & we both kick, we can get to shore.” It works.

Back in the car, we marinate quietly in our separate swamps of self-disgust: “I would’ve died without his help.” “I almost killed him.”

4.
Then, I was too skinny to be buoyant; now, I’m unsinkable. Adrift in my skin boat – hide stretched taut across the ribs, the sea on the wrong side – I float through my days.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Migration

Quarter till six. I’m sitting outside with my coffee and a brand new pocket notebook, in which I am writing the following words: A jet crosses the chest of Orion, dragging its roar half a sky behind it. Fog forms around me as I write, guessing at the lines, unsure of whether I have started this notebook with black or blue ink. Trucks are loud in the valley — I try to determine from the quality of the sound whether or not they are driving through thick fog.

Last night, I dreamed about finding my missing set of keys — they had been right where I usually keep them, and had simply been hiding from me each time I looked there before. Now, they were ready to be found. But other things remain lost. It seems that I am part of a group of pilgrims about to set off for New Orleans on foot, but I want to bow out and go by car instead because my glasses are in such bad shape. One of the lenses keeps popping out, and I’m afraid that if the frame breaks I won’t be able to get it repaired on the road. Even in the dream, I realize the foolishness of this anxiety. But I am quite nearsighted, and always feel terribly vulnerable without glasses.

We’re following one of New Orleans’ cemetery angels come to life, who is searching for her missing thumb and thinks that it might have been ‘borrowed’ by a hitchhiker desperate to get out of the city. Our plan: to comb the shoulders of every major road and highway between here and there. When we find the thumb, the angel will turn back to stone and will return to her station, directing traffic at the center of a vast necropolis. For now, she seems human enough — in fact, she has a bit of a pout. I want to find out if her wings smell of mildew, but she keeps her distance.

As the light strengthens, my handwritten words get smaller and straighter, falling into line. The stars fade. I hear the “wick wick wick” of migrating wood thrushes dropping down into the trees to rest and forage. They have thousands of miles yet to go. It makes me sad to think I won’t hear them sing again until next May.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Four nights of dream

I dream of beaten fields, whole landscapes cleansed of desire & pressed flat by an enormous iron. I start awake, not as if from a nightmare but from the ingestion of something too heavy, too incompatible with dreaming. I stumble downstairs & scan the latest headlines: people cutting holes in their attics, standing in water up to their necks. Whole towns smashed to rubble. There are rumors of bodies floating through the streets.

The next night, I dream of meeting my fetch, who resembles me in every way except that he seems to be a bit of a pedant & is not at all good-looking. We join forces to beat up my older brother, who is greatly offended. I wake to stories of gunfire & looting & the president surveying the damage from 20,000 feet.

In the following night’s dream, my nine-year-old niece gets a visit from herself as a five-year-old. They exchange spiteful words & withdraw to a safe distance, glaring. I wake & read about rapes and near-riots in the Superdome, mothers carrying dead children, children standing watch over dead grandparents, helpless to stop the bloating & the grim ministrations of rats.

Early the next morning, I find myself kneeling in my parent’s dining room beside the ghost of a young girl who grows steadily more visible as we talk. I casually touch the black skin of her arm. She feels solid, alive, she giggles & chatters like any five-year-old. “What is your name?” I ask softly. She pretends to mishear. “Her name is Lucy,” she says, holding up her blond doll. “I’m going to go stay in her house now. She lives in a big ol’ mansion on a hill with columns out front.”

My mother watches anxiously from the sofa. “Were those your parents we saw disappearing in the middle of the field?” she wonders. A look of panic crosses the girl’s face. She grips my hand tightly, & I wake. I get a shower & sit outside in a folding canvas chair under the stars, taking small sips of black coffee, then tilting my head all the way back. The Pleiades stand high overhead; Mars glimmers to their right, a bloodshot eye. Meteors flare one after the other & quickly gutter in the dark waters, whichever route they take toward the horizon. I sit breathing in the honeysuckle fragrance of wild tobacco – also called white shooting-star, after the shape of the blossoms – & listen to the crickets stuttering toward dawn.
__________

My Paul Zweig reading project is, I hope, only temporarily stalled. I have been following the news closely, for once, and busying myself with many distractions. The title here plagiarizes Natsume Soseki’s 1908 collection of linked stories translated as Ten Nights of Dream. I’d love to hear from readers who may have had similarly disturbing dreams over the past week.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

What remains

This entry is part 14 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the third poem in the second section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details.

I must say that the longer I continue with this project, the more difficult it becomes to bring my full attention to each poem without some calculation entering into it. That is to say, as my desire to write poems in response comes to feel increasingly compulsory, my reading becomes increasingly distracted and fragmentary.

Losing a Friend
by Paul Zweig

When the anger finally came
We were starting to find how much we already knew
About dead friendships . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 9-08-05]

* * * *

Lament

How many friends have I neglected
because I was too busy waiting for
the long shadows of January
or watching clouds cross some ephemeral
forest pool, dark with tannins?
How many friendships have withered
while I stalked a slug along an oak log
orange with fungi, agog at its ability
to glide on an instant carpet
& retract the stilts of its eyes
all the way into its head?
I’ve lost friends & learned how to be
merciless with myself – I mean,
how to edit.
Living in this mountain hollow,
I tell myself I could never take
the same walk twice.
I have planted myself here like
a yellow birch sapling on top of a hemlock stump
that rots away even as the birch encircles it
with an apron of roots, & a hundred
years later it still preserves, unseen,
the hollow shape of the corpse
that gave it life.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

How else?

This entry is part 13 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the second (and title) poem in the second section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details.

The Dark Side of the Earth
by Paul Zweig

We don’t talk about the war anymore,
Living on the dark side of the earth,
The winter side . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 9-08-05]

* * * *

The News at Four A.M.

I wake to a slow dripping
outside my window,
click on the news,
then remember
the recycling has to go out.

My feet find
the path without
a flashlight. I wade
through faintly visible fog,
a soundproof room
inhabited by the automatic
lusts of insects.

Halfway to the road,
I come to a halt.
There in the darkness
at my feet,
from glowworm
to glowworm

something is passing, it seems,
fading out at one spot
only to come back on
a few feet ahead:

a faint, cool signal
making its way over
the hidden face
of the earth.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Advancing into sleepless woods

This entry is part 12 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

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I’m reading Paul Zweig. This is the first poem in the second section of his Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details.

Getting Older
by Paul Zweig

Advancing into sleepless woods,
Each year the ice getting thinner,
And the trapped waters darker . . .

[Remainder of poem removed 9-05-05]

* * * *

Getting Heavier
    for SB

Prematurely grave –
sentences delivered with a note of finality,
syllogisms grasped & held in the mind
the way excess skin from a facelift
vanishes into a crack beside the ears –
I stretch myself over the same
mattress of bone, morning & evening.
I go on as if nothing happened,
as if I were free on my own recognizance
& this growing heaviness simply means
I need more sleep.
I’ve become adept at ignoring
the jagged piece of sky pressing down
on the back of my neck.
Since I stopped following the news,
my dreams supply all the missing details
of earthquake, torture, & mass starvation.
Ask me anything.
Sometimes I get up in the middle of the night
& pretend it’s morning: shower, drink coffee
& look for poems in the ready-made phrases
I think of as inspired, because breath belongs
to everyone & no one
& I am trying not to give undue weight
to the new reports that claim
it is oxygen, stripping the electrons
from other molecules, that slowly
reduces this body to a swamp of light.