Poems & poem-like things – Page 1147

August 13, 2005September 17, 2015 by Dave Bonta

The pure distance

This entry is part 2 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

Northern true katydid (Pterophylla camellifolia)

What does it mean to bring one’s full attention to a text? Medieval Christian mystics pioneered a form of deep reading, lectio divina, which they viewed as indispensable to clear thinking, prayer and contemplation. As one present-day Benedictine monk puts it,

The art of lectio divina begins with cultivating the ability to listen deeply, to hear “with the ear of our hearts” as St. Benedict encourages us in the Prologue to the Rule…. [This] is very different from the speed reading which modern Christians apply to newspapers, books and even to the Bible. Lectio is reverential listening; listening both in a spirit of silence and of awe. We are listening for the still, small voice of God that will speak to us personally – not loudly, but intimately.

(For more on lectio divina, see Slow Reads blogger Peter’s review of Sacred Reading: the Ancient Art of Lectio Divina, by Michael Casey.) Could something of this technique be carried over into secular reading? After all, every truly inspired text is full of silences and caesuras, places where the incommensurability of word and world appears to be a source of energy rather than an obstacle, like the gap in a spark plug. The goal would be a bit more modest: rather than Christian contemplation, I’m after little more than the meditative trance brought on by immersion in creative work. That’s the logic behind this experiment in writing poems prompted by the poems of others, beginning with Paul Zweig: more antiphony than lectio, I suppose. My intent is not to try and equal – or even really to imitate – the original poem, but simply to respond to it out of my own experience, using the most exact and exacting language I can muster. I don’t expect every response to be a resounding success. But I am hoping that the effort will lead me to listen more attentively to all the sounds and layers of meaning in the original texts.

Here’s the second piece included in Zweig’s Selected and Last Poems, edited by C. K. Williams, Wesleyan University Press, 1989. (After a week or so, I’ll remove his poems from the posts in order to avoid copyright infringement.)

Walking over Brooklyn
by Paul Zweig

Black smoke trails from the incinerators,
Bits of cardboard flaming in the cage
On top of tall chimneys….

[Remainder of poem removed 8-21-05]

* * * *

Eye to Eye

In the story of my childhood I am
usually elsewhere, a thin presence to myself,
mumbling from a script of my own devising.
It never occurs to me to wonder
how my opposite number the hero
might really feel: Hey, it’s hot up here!
I’m tired of coming to the rescue of girls
you’re too scared to say one word to.
And how can you call yourself a pacifist
& expect me to avenge all wrongs
with my infallible fists?

Of unscripted moments, I remember few.
I wreck every kite I ever try to fly
in the mountaintop’s sideways wind.

Late summer of my 40th year, I catch
an echo of my childhood in the nightly
chorus of katydids, their camouflaged
leaf-bodies falling out of & back into unison
like a concert audience that continues its rhythmic
clapping during a break in the music.
I float on that throbbing: sleep is the only time
I get to dream now. By day, I tread
the high wires of the cicadas’ whine
& press a cold watermelon to my belly –
one sightless eyeball to another.
Soon enough, all distance will dissolve
into a single arc of spent sugar.
The half-moon will rise a lurid red.

August 12, 2005September 17, 2015 by Dave Bonta

Them bones

This entry is part 1 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

Marooned in motel rooms for five days with a single, well-thumbed book of poetry, I pored over the words of Paul Zweig – his Selected and Last Poems, edited by C. K. Williams, Wesleyan University Press, 1989 – like a shipwrecked survivor hoarding pieces of driftwood. I began thinking about a new experiment in close reading or exegesis wherein I would write poems of my own in response to poems by some of my favorite writers, beginning with Zweig. I have no idea whether I’ll be able to carry through with it or not; even stating the aspiration here violates a personal taboo against articulating an ambition for a writing project before undertaking it. So it’s more than likely that this post will be a one-off. In any case, my intent is not to match Zweig’s effort – a near-impossibility – but simply to respond to it using the most exact and exacting language I can muster.

Here’s the poem C. K. Williams chose as the opener; it originally appeared in the book Against Emptiness. As always, merely typing out the words of another poet enforces a more intimate kind of reading than I am used to…

On Discovering a Thighbone under a Heap of Stones
by Paul Zweig

I
I’m waiting for the Druid to claim his bone
In the woodshed. I have dusted and cleaned it,
But the stain of earth remains….

[Remainder of poem removed 8-18-05]

* * * *

On Discovering a Poem by Paul Zweig

I have grown too accustomed to the terms
of surrender, the unconditional so-called
human condition. In the crawl-space
under my house, dust where no rain
has fallen in a hundred & fifty years
preserves not merely bones but hide
& hair of rat, raccoon, groundhog.
A porcupine flat as a punctured balloon
still bristles with the nibs of dry pens.
Every few years when I have to repair
the insulation around the heating ducts,
I uncover the remains of my fellow inhabitants
with a shock of recognition:
that I have never been here before, as long
as I have traveled in this one place.
Perennial wonder that we & the dead
should possess such durability. Aside
from the body’s moist exudates,
what passes? Earth, bone, these fossils
under our faces: consonants in
some ancient Baedeker
dehydrated for easy portability –
add vowels & serve.

I ask no more of you than what you wanted
from yourself, Zweig. The opening poem
in your posthumous book almost begs
the well-traveled reader to pass by.
Blood, stones, field – the shibboleths
of every workshop poet. But I am hardly
a sophisticate myself; what better place
to begin than the common gate?
Gate.
Rogate.
Interrogate.
We spell each other, then. The dry bones live.

August 10, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Blogging from the ninth circle

In case anyone is wondering where the hell I’ve been: my brother and I are stranded in Summersville, WV with a broken-down car. I came down last Saturday for a cousin’s wedding in Beckley and I’ve been here ever since, with no access to the Internet until now, eating junk food and watching many bad movies. Virtually every mechanic in a five-mile radius has examined my brother’s 1990 Olds, replacing a number of parts, but it still won’t run. Short of getting a local Pentecostal preacher to drive the demons out of it, we have explored every option. It looks very much as if we will have to ditch it and rent a car to get us back home (we’re well off the Greyhound route).

Staying on the strip (first at a Super 8, then at a Hampton Inn), I’ve been forced to think about this most ubiquitous of American landscapes…

Strip. Lay down your overburden, bare your black seam of heat where the shovels can reach it. Let rains tease your acids from the rock.

Strip, stripe of concrete between gas stations & inconvenience stores, chain restaurants, big box stores, motels, each marooned on its own island of tarmac. We are all strangers here, even the natives.

Strip: supposedly comic, unmoving pictures starring the same faces, day after day. We grimace at the punchlines: Neighborhood Grill and Bar, says the Applebee’s sign. Oh, do let’s take a stroll ’round the Village Square!

Stripped of wheels, we navigate the strip on foot, automatic jaywalkers. The smell of fryer grease mingles with exhaust. Under one streetlight, we step carefully around the corpses of three starlings. We could be anywhere. This might as well be home.

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July 31, 2005 by Dave Bonta

The outhouse poet strikes again

We are very different writers, he & I.
He uses the point of a nail clipper
to etch his angular letters where they’ll reach
the broadest possible audience. Paper
is what you wipe with, says he.
Me, I revere the dirt beneath my nails
as if it were the dust of my ancestors,
which it might well be. Nature abhors
a pit, say I. We are all connected.

The shithouse poet only gets the urge to write
when he gets the urge. Sometimes his muse
is loosened by 24-hour news-mongering
on the fear channel. Squatting over the void,
hole to hole, he vents in rhyme.

Me, I make my own buzz,
rub my forefeet together for warmth.
If you didn’t know any different,
you might think I was praying.
You might take this windowless house for a hermit’s cell.

July 23, 2005December 8, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Future Blues

with apologies to Willie Brown

The cicada rasps an elegy to metal: the future was never supposed to be anything like this. Light spilled from every surface, not merely from the heart of some minor star. Robots made calluses obsolete. Space was a growth industry in an expanding universe.

Do you remember how we used to hold each other in our tinfoil suits, swaying to the hum & throb of rockets? There were no sagging porches in the rain, then, no clawhammer banjo or bumblebees wallowing through bergamot. Food grew in a grime-free solution, unsullied by the scandal of earth.

There were trees, yes – somehow we could never imagine a stage set without a green backdrop & props of wood. But the fate of the planet no longer hinged on whether any given ant could make it back to the nest, staggering under the weight of the corpse of a fly.

July 22, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Close

After one day with low humidity (Wednesday), it’s back to being almost unbearably close & sticky. Even thinking seems too great an effort. Frustrated, I lean back in my chair & turn my head upside-down, gazing at the ceiling until floor & ceiling trade places. How clean & uncluttered the house suddenly appears!

Outside in my garden, a monarch glides in & lands on the butterfly weed, orange rhyming with orange. After a few minutes it lifts off & lands on the budleia’s purple torch. Stained glass wings sail rather than flutter. Thanks to its larval nursing on milkweed poisons, the monarch is able to save for transcontinental journeys the energy it would otherwise have to expend on chaos – the typical butterfly strategy for evading capture.

Up at my parents’ house, a red-spotted purple clings to the kitchen screen door handle, dusting the knob for thumbprints. Its wings are tattered & faded, with three large holes torn out of the bottom edges. I picture the phoebe diving for the dark abdomen & coming up with a beak full of dry leaves. Close, but no cigar.

I’m peeling my first ripe peach of the season. The stem gone, I can see into the center where the halves of the pit have pulled apart. I hold it up to the light. It glows like the sun’s own chapel, golden yellow. But as I cut the flesh away, a mound of mold appears in each hemisphere of the pit, in size & color identical to the clumps of dust that gather in the backs of closets & under the bed.

As I walk back down to the other house, I think: closeness is something that alternately attracts and repels. Here the cockleburs, there the tear-thumb; here beggar ticks, there raspberry canes. I duck my head to dodge a wasp, swipe ineffectually at a mosquito.

Back at my writing table, I stare at the ceiling some more. This is like doing the back stroke – the only style of swimming I enjoy. Once or twice each summer it’s fun to go to some little lake in the mountains & bare my fishbelly-pale skin to the too-close sun, ears under the waterline, kicking & sculling just enough to stay afloat. It’s so quiet under the water. And the sky looks more & more like another, fully inhabitable world, so clean & uncluttered.

The peach was delicious.

July 18, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Raincrow

Yesterday around noon and again this morning early, a black-billed cuckoo has been calling from the woods’ edge. He sounds like the spirit-world counterpart of his commoner cousin the yellow-billed.

Cuckoos of either species are mysterious birds, so oftener heard than seen, skulking in the thickest parts of the forest canopy where they wait motionless for long periods before rocketing into action, ambushing their caterpillar prey. “Cuckoos eat many spiny caterpillars and the spines stick in the lining of the stomach,” the webpage for the black-billed cuckoo informs us. “The stomach lining is periodically shed to remove the spines.”

The first time I got a good look at one, I realized suddenly where those long, narrow-bodied birds in Pennsylvania German folk art came from. Messenger of love, said Europeans about the cuckoo’s old-world namesake, which lays its eggs in the nests of other birds so it can spend all its time in courtship. Raincrow, the Indians called both the yellow- and black-billed cuckoos for their tendency to call more frequently before storms. They also typically return at the same time as the early-summer rains.

The cuckoo is one of the last neotropical migrants to arrive in North America and has very little time to build a nest, find a mate, lay its eggs and raise its young. To do so, it has evolved a unique nesting strategy. It is able to time its egg laying with outbreaks of insects (especially caterpillars) so that it has a rich food source for itself and its young. Its incubation/nestling period is the shortest of any known bird. Its egg develops rapidly, and at hatching is one the heaviest of all North American songbirds. This is because the chick will have very little rearing time before embarking on its transcontinental migration – it must complete much of its development while still in the egg and come out ready to go. The nestlings are fledged from the nest 6-7 days after hatching, and are off to South America at three or four weeks of age.

Thus the Center for Biological Diversity, based in the western U.S. where the yellow-billed cuckoo is nearly extinct as a result of habitat destruction.

This morning at first light a thrush flies past the porch on loud wings, like a fast smack of oars against the surface of a pond. A bat loops and dives, half-visible against the darker trees. It has been astonishingly humid, with daily and sometimes hourly thunderstorms. The raincrows call almost without a pause. Walking in the woods has become, for me, a misery of sweat and deerflies. If the air were any thicker, we would need periscopes to find our way.

GROWTH

Mind poised at
the tipping point
in a fantasy of perpetual motion
like an old-fashioned toy,
wooden bird hinged
at the hips that bends
again & again into
the undiminished fuel
of its reflection.
Last week, I saw
the sun in the surface
of a bog: it bubbled.
It trilled like a toad.
The alchemists
would be pleased, mercury
now lurks nearly everywhere.
Its needle threads the eye
of mother’s milk, quick-
silver fin & feather, legs
of a heron. Extract
of death, let us dance.
Let our bones be honey-
combed with light.
Bulbous, wedded
to our rituals,
we take turns bending
at the hips.

July 15, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Some birds

DRYOCOPUS

Why do they call it drumming, what pileateds do? Why not knocking? A tree is more door than drum. Bark bears little resemblance to skin or cured hide. But the hammered beats of a pileated woodpecker are far more rapid than any rap of a knuckle – too fast, in fact, for a casual listener to count. Can we imagine being summoned by such a sound? What winged visitant bears a blazing crest & is given to such bouts of maniacal laughter? What door opens downward, into the earth?

BLAZON

Wet from its bath, a scarlet tanager lands on a dead branch in the midday heat like a hallucinated fruit. This is that hoarse singer, I think, that robin with a frog in its throat. I watch from the porch as he pivots twice, then darts up out of sight: less an exotic morsel than the rampant tongue.

MNEMONIC

“Oh, that?” I said – & thus the otherwise unremarkable, two-syllable song of the Acadian flycatcher might as well be committed to memory.

IN THE TEXAS HILL COUNTRY

Making oneself at home in a bone-dry thorn scrub no one else could love & hailing all visitors: this is the golden-cheeked warbler’s perilous way.

TROUBLE IN MIND

A pair of starlings up under the eaves is for us, out here in the hills, a novel occurrence. Though with my gaze drawn so often lately toward the northeast, my thoughts circling that high bog set in a ring of mountains & the nearby hollow full of ancient hemlocks – blank spaces bristling with arrows on the highway engineer’s map – with all that on my mind, it takes me a while to notice these two new tenants, noisy as they are.

But the male starling’s a ventriloquist, I swear he can throw his voice. And his range – odd rasping cries, hollow knocks with thrush-like runs dubbed in… I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t caught him in the act, beak ajar. Black wings flopped & rattled with each convulsive ripple of the nape, spilling iridescence in the noonday sun. As if he’d swallowed some dark rainbow & was trying to bring it back up.

The journal I’m always meaning to keep could well carry the title Year of the Starlings, were it not for this other thing that’s been robbing me of sleep: nothing but an engineer’s wet dream, an impossible outcome, I try & tell myself, even as night after restless night fixes it more & more firmly in my mind’s eye. Yesterday morning we all heard, quite distinctly, an infant wailing from somewhere in the middle of the sky. I run around the house & there sits the starling on the ridge of the roof, head cocked to one side like a diabolical robin, waiting for some untimely nightcrawler to make a move.

(Originally written in 2002. Proposed routes for a highway bypass through Rothrock State Forest, east of State College, PA, were eventually removed from consideration after intense public pressure.)

FREE BIRD

In every flock of blue jays, there’s one who learns to impersonate a red-tailed hawk, does a spot-on rendition of that piercing shred of sky. You’ve heard it, whether you know it or not: on TV & in the movies, it’s the literal call of the wild, regardless of geography.

One can understand how a mob of jays might respond to the shriek of a police whistle. But humans hear fierce defiance & thrill to images of freedom: straight through the wilderness, a highway traveled by a lone SUV while some generic eagle-like bird circles a nearby peak.

The real redtail picks at carrion by the side of the interstate or chases pigeons in Central Park, alternately aped & persecuted by the brazen jays.

July 12, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Non sequiturs

The vacuum cleaner is covered with a layer of grime.

I carry my empty coffee cup into the kitchen & set it on the counter beside the baby bottles.

Halfway through my walk, it hits me: Last night, I was dreaming about witches.

The censor of music wears black turtleneck shirts & fancies himself a decomposer.

Insomnia is like instant water – add water & serve.

I pause in my cleaning to admire the beebalm: scarlet dust mops.

Out for an early walk, the rising sun warms my back even as the nighttime coolness still seeps between the buttons of my shirt.

I write a note to myself, cross it out & put it in my pocket.

Everyone assumes the fry cook likes to cook, but the truth is, she likes to feed people.

How long until the baby begins to suspect that the world has other flavors besides formula?

I have a feeling I could make a lot out of the fact that the scarlet tanager’s song is so hoarse & formless.

I always pause after punching down the dough to admire the imprint of my knuckles on what will soon be bread.

Panther amanita or green bolete, a chipmunk has nibbled most of the color off.

At three years of age, the asshole’s son is already well on his way to becoming an asshole.

Anything with a head of snakes gets compared to Medusa – how tiresome.

Is it really just a deerfly that keeps nuzzling the back of my neck?

I wonder what the turtles are up to right now?

July 11, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Time-tested

In the dark midsummer woods, the few things blooming now are white: rhododendron & wild hydrangea; teaberry & the so-called fairy candles of black cohosh; clusters of Indian pipes pushing through the leaf duff. The umbels of one hydrangea bush near the bottom of the hollow are dotted with blossoms ten times larger than the rest. Such sterile anomalies were long ago seized upon by nurserymen, who crossed & crossed until they bred a bush whose every inflorescence was a blind enormity.

I sift through a sandbar – legacy of last fall’s flood – with berry-stained fingers. Why should it amaze me that so small a stream can still tumble stones to perfect smoothness? I think of anchorites in their cells, each with his or her time-tested word: It was said of Abbot Agatho that for three years he carried a stone in his mouth until he learned to be silent. But was it silence he learned, or conformity with a larger music? The Verba Seniorum, polished to a perfect terseness, does not say.

Our eyes at birth are just about as big as they’ll ever be; the appealing contrast with small, bald heads guarantees a ready nest in the arms of anyone available. My five-month-old niece Elanor is wide-eyed & mostly silent, though at mealtimes she likes to strike her high chair with the flat of her hand. She reaches for everything: a new development in the last few days since moving here, my brother says. Put down on the carpet, unable yet to crawl, she rolls toward the objects of her inchoate desire – mostly things to put in her mouth, the firmer the better. I try to imagine what that must feel like, the pressure of milk teeth trying to sprout through the gums. Her cries of – what? Anxiety? Frustration? – often modulate into warbles, as if phrases of speech or music were just beginning to coalesce.

On the green plain of the maple leaf, wasps have pitched their tent-shaped galls. A scarlet tanager plucks his single string over & over. I’m composing a letter in my head, a greeting card message written in one, continuous line without lifting the pen. I have been picking black raspberries & letting the straight thorns hook my shirt; gaining release is a simple manner of leaning in. But once, just as I felt myself caught, a blue darner landed a foot away & I froze. Its eyes were the exact size & color of the individual components of a raspberry’s compound fruit, those tiny black pebbles. Angled above its metallic blue abdomen, the wings fit together like the covers of a leaf-shaped book.

Happy birthday to my parents, born 364 days apart, yesterday & today.