Poems & poem-like things – Page 1148

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.

July 8, 2005December 8, 2013 by Dave Bonta

The obvious

If I have one major talent, I like to tell people, it is in pointing out the obvious. After the Oklahoma City bombing, I said to anyone who would listen: Of course fertilizer is a deadly weapon. Imagine a million bombs like this going off every day in the once-living soils of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, India, the Philippines. How inconvenient that McVeigh and Nichols appeared so white & ordinary, so like us.

The Oklahoma City Memorial: School is out, but still we come to call roll. This could be anywhere. The even ranks of identical chairs bear testimony to the discipline, rectitude and undiscriminating universality of the bomb’s unholy curriculum.

September 11, 2001: For a week afterwards, with every airport shut down, the skies over North America were the clearest they’d been in decades. Our ears grew almost accustomed to the silence. In the woods & in the fields we could hear small things: a snail chewing on a leaf, mud cracking as it dried, the necks of sunflowers creaking in unison as the sun made its unrepeatable way across their sky.

London bombings: The panic passed quickly, survivors said. They began talking, analyzing, coordinating. Those who could walk, walked: burned or bloody, dark with soot, missing an eye or an eardrum, perhaps, but proceeding with great deliberation up into the streets, which by that time had become virtually as foreign as they.

Vietnam Memorial: Solid stone comforts in a way no living tissue can. In the space between the engraved letters, our faces lack the depth & color we are accustomed to from ordinary mirrors. Maya Lin has the clearest mind of any American artist since John Cage. All along the black cliff-face one can see visitors approach, hesitate, extend a trembling hand, sometimes a forehead.

July 7, 2005May 30, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Rice pudding

“Arroz con leche” – rice pudding – is the name of a popular Latin American children’s song and game. Children link hands in a circle and dance around a boy or girl who stands in the middle. The circling children sing the first two or three verses and the child in the middle sings the response (“Con éste, sí, con éste, no,”) while choosing someone from the circle to “wed.” They then switch places and the game repeats. The song has a number of variants. Here are two of them.

Arroz con leche, me quiero casar
con un mexicano que sepa cantar.

El hijo del rey me manda un papel,
me manda decir que me case con el.

Con éste, sí,
con éste, no,
con este mero
me caso yo.

Rice with milk, I want to marry
a Mexican who knows how to sing.

The king’s son sent me an order,
sent me word that I must marry him.

With this one, I do,
with this one, I don’t,
with this ordinary guy
I tie the knot.

Arroz con leche, me quiero casar
con una señorita/viudita de San Nicolás,

que sepa coser, que sepa contar,
que sepa abrir la puerta para ir jugar.

Yo soy la viudita, del barrio del rey,
me quiero casar y no encuentro con quien.

Con éste, sí,
con éste, no,
contigo, mi vida,
me casaré yo.

Rice with milk, I want to marry
a young woman/widow from San Nicolas

who knows how to sew, who knows how to count,
who knows how to go outside and play.

I am a widow from the king’s neighborhood,
I want to marry, but I never meet anyone.

With this one, I do,
with this one, I don’t,
with you, my dear,
I’ll tie the knot.

I suppose rice and milk were selected for their bridal colors, but also because rice pudding is a sweet dish in which the two main ingredients are thoroughly blended. Further speculation on the symbolism would rob this simple poem of its charm.

The game makes me think there’s more here than meets the eye, though. What at first blush seems like a reinforcement of dominant social values may actually end up subverting them. The attitude toward marriage is light-hearted and thoroughly polyamorous: by the end of the game, presuming nobody cheats and picks someone who is already “married,” everyone will be wedded to everyone else. The circle permits no hierarchies, no exclusivity.

It occurs to me it’s probably just as well we don’t have a game like this in Anglo-American culture – at least, not at such a young and innocent age. (Spin the Bottle comes later, I think.) How demoralizing it would be if one were the last to be chosen!

But perhaps Latin American kids don’t learn to be competitive at such a young age. One of the most popular Anglo circle games for the five-and-under set – always supervised by an adult – involves leaving someone out, over and over, in a survival of the fittest: Musical Chairs. One can probably tell a lot about the differences between the two cultures by comparing these two games.

Of course, being an uptight Protestant sort, holding hands was never my thing. I remember how I hated it when our first grade teacher made us line up in pairs and hold hands every time we left the classroom. It was so much better in nursery school, where everyone held onto a knot in a big, long rope and we went outside and walked all around like a human centipede.
__________

See also here for translations of Chinese nursery rhymes, plus two of my own invention.

June 30, 2005 by Dave Bonta

The critic

A small brown moth drawn in
by the glow of his laptop
clings to the flat screen
with wings outstretched.
A few pixels show
through the clear patches
in the center of each wing.
Does that feel good? he murmurs
when the blinking cursor passes
underneath it.
The bedsprings creak
in the other room.
Beyond the softly whirring fan
the famous skyline flickers
with heat lightning as
his fingers go on clattering
over the keys.

June 30, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Cibola 120

This entry is part 119 of 119 in the series Cibola

Cibola (cont’d)

The Ne-Witch dances
crazy–the feathers
on his arms flap,
the fetishes on his chest
flop & flash,
the rattlesnake rattles
on his legs clatter
like dry beans
being threshed. Then
the deus ex machina:
a loud thud, a cloud
of butterflies
& it’s Payatamu,
straight from
the Sun’s house
with his head on backwards,
turning somersaults.
He too reaches
between his legs, extracts
his trademark flute.
Blows
one high
& hideous note.
The Ne-Apacha topples over
to a chorus of cheers.
Leaps up
smiling his thanks,
falls back down:
cheers mixed with laughter.
(No witch stays dead
for long without
special measures.)
Six Newekwe in solemn
ceremony act out
his dismemberment
with children’s wooden knives.
One carves, another
rubs a growling belly,
a third, impatient,
tries to swallow
his own hand.
At last each takes
his cut & parades it
around the plaza:
nothing in fact
but clothes & calabash,
feathers & rattles & every
other trapping.
They wolf it down
in plain view, leave
no doubts about
their medicine power.
The clown who gets
to eat the gourd
first sits on it like an egg
then smashes it against
his forehead, stuffs
the fragments down
his gaptoothed maw,
burps extravagantly.
Another blast of the flute
& they scramble off.
* * *
A completely naked
Ne-Esteban
sits up, stares vacantly around.
Stumbles to his feet.
The hushed crowd makes way
as he wanders slowly
out of town
heading west toward the river.
A small band of children
tailing at a distance
watch as he pauses,
spreads his arms
in a gesture that could
mean anything
& plunges in.

THE END
__________

Payatamu: Payatamu may be compared to a cross between Apollo and Dionysius; in his Dionysian form (as here) he is often called Ne-Payatamu. The “Ne-” signifies the comic inversions identified most closely with the Newekwe clown order.

On the distinction between Payatamu and the New Age invention Kokopelli, see the very lucid explanation near the bottom of this page.

As mentioned elsewhere, “Apacha” is the Zuni word for “enemy,” applied without distinction to the various Diné (Navajo and Apache) peoples with whom they have had fraught, trading/raiding relationships over the centuries. Enemies are witches almost by definition.

For my Bahktin-influenced descriptions of the Zuni sacred clown orders, see Laughing in church and Houston, we have a problem…

June 29, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Cibola 119

This entry is part 118 of 119 in the series Cibola

Cibola

Feet drum
on the plaza:
from all seven cities
the people pack the terraces,
crowd the streets.
The air
crackles. Faint
whiff of ozone.
Then
Newekwe!
They pop
out of skylights,
fall off roofs. Children
shriek with joy.
The clowns mimic
jealous lovers,
men who can’t
get it up,
old women
who can’t get enough.
The grownups howl.
Three Newekwe circle
the Sun Priest
slowly wagging their heads
from side to side.
One pulls out a pouch
& solemnly sprinkles
handfuls of dust
as if it were sacred prayermeal.
The Milky Way People
stop at nothing,
they can drink four day-
old piss & smack
their lips, eat shit
& live. On this holy
day of feasts & dances
they bring out for
their star attraction
the Head Witch:
one of their own
dressed as a black Apache.
He grimaces,
sticks out his tongue
at the priests, dashes
around the square bellowing
an invocation to one
of the predator spirits.
And reaching under
his breechclout, leering,
pulls out a calabash.
Gusts of laughter.
He shakes it threateningly.
Another clown impersonating
the head Bow Priest
blanches, covers his eyes
with both hands, hollers
May your roads
be fulfilled!
More laughs.

(To be continued.)

June 28, 2005 by Dave Bonta

The art of reading

Reading something for the second time is so much more satisfying than that first read-through. So many books withhold their full treasures from the first-time reader. Not that the first time can’t be special too, of course: surfaces are beautiful, and not to be taken lightly. During that first, heady encounter with a text, it is not merely the words that entrance us. The typefont, the design, the texture of the paper, the look and feel of covers and slipcovers, even the smell of the bindings – if new – or the patina that comes with good use: these too are manifest occasions for pleasure and surprise.

But few of us possess the skill as readers to avoid succumbing to that first-time excitement and finishing the book too soon. And to lay it aside at that point, never to return, would constitute not simply callousness but profound disrespect. Unless the book at hand be some cheap, manupulative thing, in which case even a single reading amounts to little more than “an expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” as Shakespeare once said about something else entirely.

As a reader, I must always aspire to do better next time and never become satisfied with my current techniques. If I know that my first time through a book tends to be a bit on the shallow side, I may change strategies and begin by lightly skimming through what look like the best spots, or re-visiting it at unexpected times and places, dipping into it just enough to whet my appetite for the first, prolonged session. But by then the first reading is really the second, or the third – it doesn’t matter. I’m no longer keeping score.

The kinds of books I enjoy most don’t necessarily need to be sampled in a set order, and sometimes I like to start with the last poem or chapter and work my way slowly toward the front. Or sometimes it’s fun to start in the middle and work toward both ends, alternating between the front half and the back. Hence, I suppose, my disdain for tightly plotted novels that insist on rigid conformity with standard procedure. Plus, given my addictive personality, I hate to get sucked into a book like that because I know I won’t be able to sleep, eat or do much of anything else until it’s done. Ten or twenty hours later I’ll emerge from the novel as if from a parallel universe, shaking with adrenaline and ready to drop from exhaustion at the same time. After an experience like that, it will take me several days to undo the spell and fully return to my own, familiar weltanschauung.

There was a time in my youth when I thought that kind of full-throttle excitement was indispensable to the enjoyment of a book. But as I near the threshold of maturity I find myself craving a calmer and – I would argue – deeper form of immersion. This doesn’t rule out novels altogether, but it does definitely favor the second reading over the too-hasty first one. The plot once exposed for the artful contrivance that it is, one is free to take one’s time and relish the writing for its own sake. All goals have been abandoned aside from the most general: to advance in pleasure through insight – or is it vice versa? Unless one has some ghoulish analytic project to complete, some heartless application of the whips and restraints of academic theory, one can dwell within the garden of the text almost indefinitely for the colors and the scent alone. The mind explores gently and almost by instinct now, enfolded in a matrix where word, image and meaning are coterminous and virtually indistinguishable. The senses return to an almost Edenic innocence. Freed of judgements and distances, the patient reader at last attains a kind of high plateau, every pore fully open and flooded with the clearest, coolest light.

What the writer finally wants to save,
laboring into the white afternoon
at her kitchen table,
adrift in drafts,
ringed in scraps for
the compost, is just this savoring
of time’s luxuriant spread.

June 27, 2005 by Dave Bonta

The mother

Last night, just as it was getting dark, I heard a noise outside that I couldn’t immediately place. I went out into the garden, then around to the front porch. The sounds were coming from right inside the woods’ edge, and hard as I looked, I couldn’t see anything. But as I listened, it became increasingly obvious what I was listening to: bears. Probably the mother with three cubs that my mom saw up by the vernal ponds last month.

We’ve had this same mother bear around for about six years now, but she has yet to become habituated to us, which is probably a good thing. People are bad news. She might well be the same bear who, as a yearling cub, alerted us to the death of her sibling with her loud bawling one beautiful October morning around 10:00 o’clock. It was throatier than the bleat of a fawn, with an uncanny keening edge to it. We looked down from the front porch of my parents’ house and saw two black shapes in the springhouse lawn, not more than twenty feet away from where these bears were now.

The one that had been bawling retreated into the woods when we approached to examine the carcass – a half-grown black bear with the shaft of an arrow protruding from the middle of its back. Someone had shot it from a tree stand down in the valley, most likely, and it had gotten this far before giving up the ghost. We posted a $500 reward for any information leading to the apprehension of the would-be poacher, but nothing ever came of that – people just don’t like to rat on their neighbors. Still, the local paper picked up the story and the word went out: leave the bears the hell alone in Plummer’s Hollow.

The surviving cub was obviously pretty traumatized, but if this is the same bear, she must’ve found our end of the mountain to be a relatively hospitable place to raise a family, with three litters in the years since. I briefly considered walking over with my camera and trying to get a flash picture of a charging bear, but decided I wasn’t quite ready to risk a mauling just to get a good blog post. I stayed on the porch listening until the mosquitoes drove me back inside.

Right at dusk the mother bear
leads her cubs down to
the edge of the woods
& stops, hearing a screen door
ease open, smelling trouble.

My grossly unequal nose picks up
nothing of her musk or
the sweet milk oozing
from well-bit nipples.
My primate eyes are made for
the colors of day, not shades
of darkness. I peer
into every shadow between the trees,
each clot of night.

The space between us fills
with explosions of breath:
HUH. HUH.
I hear claws on tree trunks
& small things running through the brush.
When the mother clacks her teeth,
I hear the dangerous size of her
in that hollow TOCK
TOCK
TOCK.

I lean out over the porch rail, listening,
naked from the waist up.
A mosquito whines in my ear.
The fireflies, as usual,
illuminate nothing.

The next morning, when I go to look,
every rock on the hillside
has been moved from its bed.

June 27, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Cibola 118

This entry is part 117 of 119 in the series Cibola

Reader (21)

–Quién es este labrador
que os responde y acompaña?
–Soy el que dice al revés
todas las cosas que habra.
(“Who’s this yokel of yours
always chiming in, talking back?”
“I’m the one who says the opposite
of everything there is.”)
LOPE DE VEGA
El mejor alcalde, el rey

Beyond creeds and anti-creeds, the [Neweekwe] clowns, by their ability not only to conceive but to carry out their burlesques, display their ultimate detachment from the particulars of religious beliefs of all kinds. . . . In their gluttony the clowns even violate the boundaries of their biological being: not satisfied with saying the unsayable, they eat the inedible. . . . [T]hey see boundaries, of whatever sort, as easy hurdles . . .
BARBARA TEDLOCK
The Beautiful and the Dangerous

The mouth knows nothing of yesterday.
MALINKE PROVERB

June 24, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Mountain state (2)

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the song of the winter wren goes spiraling
into the treetops down cliff under ferndrip ledge
follows the loop of a fox grape vine
& lodges in the bend of birthwort’s
pipe-shaped flower

it twines across the altar of my concentration
electric now with offerings
every part of worry anxiety hope

& tunneling through a weave of rhododendron
the trail goes straight, gently undulating
like the narrow-gauge rail bed it once was
carrying out trees in short sections
from what somehow managed to remain wild
high bowl of a remote mountain watershed
& freed from any need to watch our feet
we scarcely notice how much we have climbed
how much we have left behind

I glide as through a gallery, hungry for visions
saunter as if along a city sidewalk
each tulip tree and oak another body
to measure against my own
each of us a stranger only to ourselves
the slick fictions we grow year by year
in rings around the so-called heartwood
where sap long since ceased to flow

I see myself held in an eye of wood
I am implicated in a ripple of grain laid bare
when the bark dropped off

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but the plant people if you want
to call them that are far more timid than we are
we look at them carefully out of
the corner of an eye & pretend
only to care about identification
as if membership in a tribe or species
tells us anything beyond what name to use
when talking behind their backs
what they really have to say I think has
something to do with how to hold our ground

even the most active beings can make me feel
less like a discoverer than the discovered
is this for example the same tiger swallowtail
weaving drunkenly above the water
for the last three miles
every time I catch a glimpse of the creek?

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the trail wanders past an old cellarhole with a new
display of plastic flowers that spell “Mom”
& a garden site gone wild with mountain mint
we stuff our pockets with the fragrant leaves

we pause at a spring where mossy stones sleep
like small green bears
I pull out my camera & my friend bares her teeth

here’s a veery, descending call
like a flute inside a bottle as
my friend puts it
or perhaps two flutes played by a single flautist

we cook lunch among the boulders on the creek
& afterwards go browsing for lichen patterns
my friend seeing endpapers for hand-made books

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I spend a short century in a smiling contest
with the mossy head of a demiurge of stone
rising from the water, lines of bubbles
swimming slowly through its patch of sun
rich baritone voice in a language I feel
I can almost understand
& all around it the creek in shadow

& I am whispering encantado,
desencantado like a child
slowly plucking the spokes of a daisy
cantar is still the commonest
verb for “sing” in Spanish so
to be encantado really means to be caught
in a web of song I muse
focusing one at a time on each
voice in the watery chorus

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on the walk back we find a redrock shelf
at the edge of the creek pitted with potholes
some empty, others cupping moon-shaped pieces
of sky & a few mosquito larvae
wriggling back & forth in what
doubtless only looks like ecstasy

I can say anything, I think, arrogant
in my power to make little worlds from words
but anything I can say falls short of this world
its liquid laughter pure from the beginning
free of the salt of tears

just before leaving we stop at a spring with a waterfall
& a black PVC viaduct strung on a cable
gravity water for someone whose dog barks
from the other side of the creek
we fill all our bottles
& thrust cupped hands into the flow

surely water clear as glass should let us
see into some kind of future
or at least as far as the mountain’s stone heart
but it’s my own arteries I see
throbbing in my wrists
I lower my face to the would-be window & drink

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the next day on the flat-topped Allegheny Front
I study the cousinship of peak & bog
the same plants so often growing on both
& here the two kinds of places merge into one
when I piss at the edge of a dry boulder field
I hear the splash of water into water

Dolly Sods is still beautiful still teeming with life
despite its horrific usage by arrogant humans
who saw nothing but timber, pasturage
& a bombing range during World War II
natural extremity makes it at once more vulnerable
& more likely to resist the tendency of the badly used
to become ugly common & mean

& I know nothing, I think, suddenly ashamed
of my inability to look beyond wounds to
the grace & power of the wounded
which includes virtually every part of this land
which has been your land and my land for far too long
& needs to be its own land again

an interpretive sign explains how
wind-tortured red spruce trees grow branches
only on the leeward side for decades until
other spruce grow in around them & then
they knot their roots together among the rocks
gather stillness & the spongy beginnings
of new humus between their trunks
make a place too moist for lightning
to strike a spark & then all together
they rise up

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on the drive home the edge of my concentration
grows blunt as a butter knife
which is to say I lose my temper
& my ordinarily kind companion loses hers
& we ride in silence for a while
discoveries made in a mountain state
must not be transferable I think glumly
everything we found remains behind

but the truth turns out to be otherwise
because unbeknownst to us
three craneflies got into the car at the last stop
before our long descent
& we can’t get rid of them
rolling down the window at the strategic moment
only blows them into the back of the car
& though for a while we think they’re gone
eventually they reappear
dancing in front of the windshield on flimsy wings
their long legs dangling & we give up
& laugh & let them ride & by the time
we get back I’ve forgotten all about them

I carry my gear into the house unpack & sit out
on my front porch watching the fireflies blink
under a second-quarter moon
until my eyes won’t stay open any longer

where state lines fall is an accident of history
& come to think of it I have yet
to leave the mountains
we will keep on returning whichever way we travel
the mountain state is still there & so are we

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