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

Appalachian fall

This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Blogging the Appalachians

1.
Black birch roots above the water.
Witch hazel blooming against the rocks.

2.
Above the water: a spring half covered with birch leaves – yellow – & the red and orange of maples.
Against the rocks: boulders as big as you want.
One in particular that hikers circumambulate, patting its elephant-gray sides.

3.
The stream can’t decide whether to flow over or under the ground.
If you put your ear down low, you can hear it trickling through caverns full of salamanders & stolen moonlight.

4.
The birch won’t be here long – no more than a single human lifetime.
Its trunk rests on four columns, two tercet arches above the water.
A winter wren darts from grotto to grotto.
When he pauses to sing, you think, this is how rivers get started.

5.
Rain & fog.
Pale yellow rays of witch hazel against the dark rocks, the moss-backed boulders.
What we notice depends on how often we stop, how well we listen.
You don’t need to know the names of anything, really.

6.
The birch in all likelihood doesn’t care about its reflection.
Witch hazel will scatter its seeds through small explosions; it doesn’t need the birds.
Trees die & fall – or vice versa – but are far from dead.
Wren gleans silverfish & millipede, bark beetle, caddis fly: all small things that scuttle, flutter, flow.

7.
The mountain emerges as a series of rests, an improvised pause.
You climb past the boulders in the rain, humming, a shock of white hair under a dark umbrella.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Two translations

NIGHT THOUGHTS OF A TRAVELER

by Du Fu (712-770 C.E.)

A breeze stirs the small grass
as the night ferry’s tall mast floats by.

Stars stretch above the endless steppe,
moon bobs in the river’s sluggish current.

My name as a man of letters – how can it last?
My post – I’m old & sick enough to quit.

Drifting, drifting, what kind of life is this?
Caught between earth & sky, a solitary gull.

*

FIVE SONGS FROM A CIRCLE DANCE

anonymous Pima Indian, 20th century

Shining Water lies
Shining Water lies
Mudhen goes wandering through it

come & see
how gracefully
he floats

*
An expanse of muddy water
for me to circle

laced with the greenest algae
arrayed in zigzags

it pleases me so much I pluck a strand
wind it around my head
encircle myself

*
My heart turns giddy
I wander in a daze
ai-ya my heart
an unbearable feeling
running toward this toward that
an unbearable feeling

*
A wind springs up
& carries me off
sets me down in the distant Place of Reeds

there the wind runs through
with a flute-like sound

there where songs are kept
forever fresh

*
Do you hear me do you hear me
the land everywhere resounding

dance on it
circling
stomp

blow gently over it

a piece of eagle down
a wisp of cloud

go in

__________

The Pima (Akimel O’odham) songs are my versions, based upon two sets of English translations – one word-for-word, the other slightly freer – in Ants and Orioles: Showing the Art of Pima Poetry, by Donald Bahr, Lloyd Paul and Vincent Joseph. Bahr’s detailed commentary gives the patient reader sufficient tools to turn his transliterations into something resembling poetry, although his identifications of plants and animals are often suspect, according to Gary Paul Nabhan (Cross-Pollinations).

The anonymous composers of these songs credited their inspiration to the spirits of the ants. The versions translated by Bahr et. al. were sung by Andy Stepp and Claire Seota on the Salt River Reservation, Arizona, 1972.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The telltale ridges

Here’s an old poem with a few revisions I made just now. (I see it’s high time I went through each of my never-finished manuscripts with the proverbial red pencil. I tell you, being a perfectionist is hell!)
*
THE KILLER TRAP

I sentenced a raccoon to death
for burrowing beneath the kitchen,
undermining my sleep with its bumping,
scratching, gnawing on the beams.
I set a killer trap in the mouth of the hole.

Just after dark I hear the snap:
lights out.

But then a frantic yelping,
a scrabbling of claws against wood.
I grab the rifle, run around back.

The coon’s wearing the trap like an ugly necklace,
lips pulled back in an inadvertent grin,
front legs smashed.
It’s managed to wrestle free of the chain
& is dragging itself ass-first into the weeds.
I put the barrel against its neck & fire, leap back.
Its death-fit flings blood in a six-foot arc.

Then the inevitable work of recovering the trap,
disposing of the carcass.
I remember that afternoon
how I released a tiger swallowtail
that had gotten entangled in the nylon garden netting.
How it then had gripped my finger so tightly
I could feel each vibration as its wings
kept jerking open, easing slowly shut.
How its proboscis swayed,
mining my fingerprint for salt:
up & down & around the telltale ridges.

As I carry off the body I hear the first katydid–
six weeks till frost.
The coon’s matted fur doesn’t put me in mind
of a hat with a tail, only of
the gloves I’m not wearing, the hole
I’m not planning to dig.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Flowerless flower

I thought for sure we’d get the killer frost predicted for the night before last, but the thermometer read 33 (F) at dawn; there was just one, little patch of white down by the stream. But friends in the valley told us it got down to 26 degrees there. I had picked all the green tomatoes and brought them inside to ripen, but now, who knows how much longer the growing season might last? Very few of the certainties about the weather that I learned growing up in the 70s seem to apply anymore.

*

Yesterday I cracked out my trusty Chinese character dictionary and attempted a translation for y’all. I have left the subject ambiguous, as it is in the original. (The standard interpretation says the poem is about a woman.)

Flowerless Flower
sung to the tune of a popular song with the same title
by Bai Juyi (also known as Po Chü-yi, 772-846)

Flowerless flower,
Of mist yet not of mist,
Comes around midnight,
Goes away at daybreak.
Comes like a dream of spring: so brief.
Goes like a cloud in the morning sky: no trace.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

October morning (tone poem)

Out for a walk before breakfast, I quickly miss my hat. The sky is clear, & as the light increases, the leaf color in the understory grows more & more distinct. Whenever I pause, the clouds from my breath rise straight up. It’s as if I’m sending smoke signals – but what is the message?

Just as I reach the top of the ridge, the sun comes up. There’s a sudden honking of Canada geese from somewhere a mile or two away: a small, local flock, I imagine, has just crossed paths with the sun at this very same moment. I look carefully to the right and left of the growing blaze of light above the horizon. The valley fog forms a parallel ridge system: ghost mountains, thrown into high relief. When I turn away, blue dots appear in my field of vision on either side of wherever I focus my gaze.

The sun at sunrise doesn’t rise; it descends. From the crowns of the oaks it seeps down limbs & trunks. I follow the moss-covered trail between shining columns, wade through streams & pools of soft, golden light. Saplings already in their autumn colors seem lit up from within. I feel as if I’ve stepped into a Maxfield Parrish illustration.*

To the west, the mountain’s shadow draws a straight line across the fog. Below in the darkness: a train whistle, cars on the highway. Above: a layer of white. Then the crest of the Allegheny Front shining in the sun. Then nothing at all.

By the time I get back, the sun’s halfway down the field. Fog streams from the barn roof. A nuthatch taps in the top branches of a walnut tree.

*
Western Pennsylvania botanist and photographer Paul Wiegman, in a post to a botanical listserve, writes:

The color change is beginning at the highest elevations of Allegheny Mt., Negro Mt., Laurel Ridge, and Chestnut Ridge, and the lower elevations are still green when viewed from a distance. From within the forest the changes are low to the ground with the ferns and herbaceous vegetation, and some of the understory trees.

Given these two notes, it appears that fall starts from the tops of the mountains and creeps to the lower elevations at the same time it begins at ground level and slowly rises into the canopy.

*
Cold October morning.
The katydids get started
well before noon.

*
A chorus of chipmunks
up & down the ridge:
mine mine mine mine mine mine mine.

*
Cold morning.
A forest full of spiderweb silk
& only the sun to trap.

*
“All this, here, overpowers everything,” Tom Montag wrote yesterday. “When you see just how beautiful the world is, all of a sudden it swallows you up and there is nothing left of you to send home. The place takes you and you’re gone. All we can write are love letters or suicide notes.”

He’s talking about watching the waves at Keweenaw Bay on Lake Superior. But it could be almost anywhere, I think. And what if one is already at home? To whom should we address our letters then?

*
Earlier, as I sat outside drinking my coffee, I noticed that the first hole had appeared in the wall of foliage across from my front porch: a small spot of pale blue among the yellow poplar and birch leaves. In a few weeks I’ll have my view of the horizon back.

But it’s folly to think that when the trees are finally all bare, things will become – you know – somehow clearer. Because isn’t this how one pictures a revelation? Brilliant. Brief.

In between there’s green, there’s brown, there’s November gray. And yes, for you fans of clarity, there’s baffling white.

*
This morning it seems
suddenly remarkable
how every shadow leads
to a particular bush, to some
tall trunk. I stand
like a tracker lost among
a profusion of paths, squinting
into the sun.
__________

*E.g. (That would be me on the left.) Amid much awfulness, “Dream October” actually isn’t too bad.

This is a contribution to the Ecotone wiki topic Plants in Place.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Longing (1)

Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances.
Robert Hass, “Meditation at Lagunitas”

*

JOHNNY TO FRANKIE

I curse you & you come back
for more, your proud lip trembling.
You deny nothing.
There are words that should never be said &
I say them one by one because they are delicious.
Every stunned look has its echo
in the pit of my stomach. It terrifies me
how much of you I have taken in
& how much more I still need.

When a hound feels sick he eats
a little snakeroot, cleans himself out.
I love you beyond reason.
If only you would pay me back in my own coin.
__________

“Frankie and Johnny” lyrics: traditional version, as interpreted by Cisco Houston, Van Morrison and (appropriately, and my favorite) Johnny Cash; Elvis Presley’s first-person version (lyrics by Gottlieb, Karger, Weisman); a review of the soundtrack for the Elvis movie musical is here.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Rubaiyat

This one’s for you

September morning just cool enough
to show the soil’s breath. Forest
in fog, new gold under
old green, give me

your delectable frost, fine
web of lines, the wind-
fallen apple that fits
so snugly in the palm

& when I take a bite it bites back.
Who’d want their sugar
straight, without
some tartness? Give it to me

dry, as they say of wine. Impure,
like every true love. And
the must – ah, let it settle
to the bottom

week by week until all
the fog is gone
& the bottle brims
with light!

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Crepuscular

It’s always a dilemma when presenting a poem: how much to explain in advance, how much to assume the audience already knows? For the following piece, it’s kind of important to know what a drumming ruffed grouse sounds like. Ruffed grouse are common here, thriving in the mountain laurel cover on the northwest-facing slopes as much in the the wild grape tangles on the southeast-facing ravines. But one rarely sees a grouse until that heart-stopping moment when it explodes from cover a few feet away. As for gray foxes, it may help to know that they are quite secretive, crepuscular and arboreal (they can climb trees like cats, and some even nest in hollow trees up to thirty feet off the ground). Gray foxes are always in residence on the mountain – due in part to the abundance of prey species such as ruffed grouse – but seeing one is a rare treat. They appear and disappear with noiseless stealth, and when seen display a calm fearlessness that leads one to believe almost that they have revealed themselves for some obscure purpose.

*

NIGHTFALL

Blink once & the gray fox
standing on a stonepile at
the edge of the woods
is gone

Blink again & the trees disappear
the soil & everything in it
leaving the briefest
of afterimages
(say biomass
say overburden)

Whatever’s left of the world
gets swept up in the wings
of a drumming grouse
that cellar hole of sound
that palpitation

As if some massive &
resilient thing were
suddenly let go from a great height
rebounding each time
a little less until
what sounds like
an acceleration

(nothing but the onrush of inertia)

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Spell: against the moving of mountains

(For what it’s worth, this is Via Negativa’s 500th post.)

The spell says everything connects. Though sometimes I long for a little more randomness in events, you know? Without mere chance, without the notion that the mind can somehow lift itself above the web of causality and inference, where might true autonomy be found?

Dale’s had some interesting things to say lately about the illusory nature of individual autonomy. I alighted on his site mole last night before bed and read a really evocative essay on rain, the nearly endless rain of winter in the Pacific Northwest. This put me in mind of Jorge Teillier with his rain- and nostalgia-drenched poems from his childhood in the south of Chile, and I thought I might start the morning with him.

And so I do. It’s raining here, of course – the remnants of Hurricane Ivan – and I’m sitting on the front porch with my morning coffee and a copy of the bilingual In Order to Talk with the Dead: Selected Poems of Jorge Teillier, translated by Carolyn Wright (University of Texas Press, 1993). I open the book at random, and the first lines I come to are these:

Ruega por mí­, reloj,
en estas horas monótonas como ronroneos de gatos.

Pray for me, clock,
in these hours monotonous as the purring of cats.

And this brings to mind a dream-image from a few hours before: a crate full of purring kittens, each packed carefully away like fine china among rags and crumpled newspapers. I remember setting the crate down on the hardwood floor here in my writing room and lying down next to it, pressing my ear to the floorboards to listen to the loud hum from all that purring.

In reality, of course, it’s my old computer that sits on the floor and hums like a dozen cats. Cats upon cats! It seems as if this computer, the worldwide web and the endless chain of felines at the Infinite Cat Project have begun to blend together in my subconscious.

There was another animal in my dreams, too: a little black bull that ran slow figure eights, trying to escape a matador. But somehow the scene shifted from Spain to Great Britain, prompted perhaps by news of Parliament’s debate over outlawing foxhunts. The bull became not quite a fox but something like a wild boar, I think, and the matador turned into a picador with a sword, then a hunter with a rifle, who walked casually behind the wounded, staggering animal with the barrel almost touching its hide. Why didn’t he shoot?

In Order to Talk with the Dead doesn’t seem to fit my mood this morning – I guess I’m looking for gravity more than nostalgia – so I go back inside and pull a volume of Charles Wright off the shelf: Appalachia (FSG, 1998). Again, I open at random and read:

Only the dead can be born again, and then not much.
I wish I were a mole in the ground,
eyes that see in the dark.

Star-nosed mole, I think. Blind, but carrying a beacon, a prehensile headlamp.

It’s always a dilemma, you see. Should I write poetry or prose this morning?

Wright, in “The Writing Life”:

Give me the names for things, just give me their real names,
Not what we call them, but what
They call themselves when no one’s listening –
At midnight, the moon-plated hemlocks like unstruck bells,
God wandering aimlessly elsewhere.

Elsewhere: there’s a ball I could run with! But I forgot to say that mole in the ground made me think momentarily of the waterlogged soil hereabouts – and then back to cats, again. Because ordinarily that’s the only way I ever get to see a mole: if a cat kills one and then leaves it in the grass when it discovers how bad it tastes. And right on cue – I swear! – a feral cat trots down the driveway. The black one with white stockings, out in the rain no doubt because she’s hungry and has no choice, and/or because she knows the rain will give her cover. Sure enough, she makes it down around the bend and out of sight without a single heckling squirrel or wren marking her passage. It’s been so long since my unilateral cease-fire went into effect that I don’t even remember to squint as I once would have done, drawing an imaginary bead on the back of her neck.

It’s so dark, I think, it might as well be 7:30 at night instead of 7:30 in the morning. Flash floods are forecast for later on today as Ivan moves through, and I worry about our access road. Two days after Frances, a section of the road bank slid into the stream down in the steepest part of the hollow, leaving a new, precipitous drop-off right at the edge of the track. We half expect to walk down to the slide area tomorrow and find the road half gone. If that happens, we’ll be cut off from the outside world for a month or more, until a contractor can get the necessary permits to bring his equipment up and rebuild the bank with limestone riprap.

*

Black cat in the rain, hunter,
avatar of luck I cannot begin
to classify, may the first star you see
herald a clearing sky. May it lead you
to slow prey & a quick kill: mouse
or vole or chipmunk, no star-
nosed mole. May hunger make you
attentive, disinclined to play with
your food. One slip
& the owl’s talons, those four-
pointed throwing stars, can find
their mark. May you keep
your distance from anything
with feathers, large
or small. I’ve never given
you a name, O wary one – I couldn’t
begin to hazard it. The bullets rest
in the cartridge case now
like little gold eyes, any one of which
could bore a blind tunnel through
the back of a neck. Let lead
lodge elsewhere, its paths
uncrossed. May all miners
stay dry in their tunnels, pray
that the mountains stand firm,
don’t backslide, & the creeks
don’t rise.

UPDATE (Saturday morning): The creek rose. Ivan has caused the worst flooding here since Agnes in 1972. The Plummer’s Hollow Road is still there – barely. Several portions are channelized too deeply for auto traffic, however. In addition, the river is over the highway at the bottom of the mountain. It looks as if I’ll be backpacking in groceries for a little while. Oddly, we never lost power.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Brothers’ keepers

On Saturday, I emceed a “Poets for Peace” reading in State College, inspired in part by Sam Hamill’s call for an International Day of Poetry on September 11. Turnout was good, despite zero coverage in the local media. (Saturday’s edition of the major newspaper in the area had a special section on “What the Flag Means to Me.”)

The format was open-mike; I read first so as to give more people time to arrive. I was going to start out with one of Vallejo’s posthumous poems, “Y si después de tántas palabras,” but decided at the last moment that the Clayton Eshleman translation wasn’t all that good and I didn’t have time to improve on it. So instead I just read two of my own, recent poems written for this blog that happened to have taken their titles from pop songs: “Both Sides Now” and “From a Distance.”

Over the next hour and a half, fifteen other people read from their own and others’ works. There was a healthy mix of ages, backgrounds (including the mayor, in an unofficial capacity) and styles of writing and delivery. I was struck by the happenstance that two different nurses, Corene Johnston and Joann Condellone, read poems they’d written. Both were older women who had organized poetry groups in their respective communitites (Bellefonte and Huntingdon), and both felt that peace must be sought in the messy details of ordinary human life. How many other such unsung emissaries for peace and poetry are working in our midst, one wonders?

Other poets in attendance included Jack Troy, Todd Davis, Cecil Giscombe, Julia Kasdorf, Lee Peterson, John Haag and Dora McQuaid. Julia and Todd, our two Mennonite poets, were the outstanding readers of the afternoon, I thought, though a young member of the local slam scene named Kathy Morrow gave what was undoubtedly the most energetic performance.

*

The following poem is one I haven’t looked at in many months, so predictably, when I pulled it out of the files on Saturday I decided that it was unfit for a reading without some serious revision. I guess at this point I would class it among my noble failures; the imaginative effort here seems somehow inadequate to the subject matter. Like Ai, whose influence here is probably a bit too palpable, I think that empathetic understanding – trying to see the world through another’s eyes – is its own reward, even (or especially) when the the subject is a basically undeserving, ungrateful, brutal psychopath. Here, though, things are a little more complex, because the subject – a death-row inmate on his way to the chair – is himself imagining an exchange with the protestors of his impending execution.

MOTH MAN

They tell me you’re there, all
you would-be witnesses. Clustered
outside the gate. Each of you
clutching your candle
like a little white lie, right hand
cupping the flame,
the hot wax dribbling down the side.
If they’d let me, I’d come out there
& tell you one or two things.
I have done what most men merely
dream about, living proof that life is
a pale, weak thing. I broke the bones
in her face the way you’d ash
out a cigarette. Fear has a smell
like sour milk & it can turn, oh Jesus!
It can turn you so goddamned ugly.
From the moment you slimed your way
into the world, having just fucked
your mother backwards, you were
a creature incapable of innocence,
a pink grub, a howling bundle of wants.
If I had my way there’d be a chair
like this one on every street corner.
They’d be like video games. Only
the truly ruthless would be able
to walk past one without trembling like
a virgin. Those of you with
a guilty conscience would be
the first in line.

Be careful, now – something’s
diving toward the flame.
That’s right, drive it away.
For its own good, little moth.
Deprive it of its final joy.