Poems & poem-like things – Page 1196

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.

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.