Via Negativa

July 24, 2012March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

Scythes revisited

This entry is part 31 of 31 in the series Odes to Tools

These scythes are just a few of the old farm tools we found in the barn and shed when we moved to Plummer’s Hollow in 1971. Other gems included a butter churn, a foot-operated grindstone and a chest-high, hand-cranked winnowing machine.

If the photo looks familiar, that’s because Phoenicia Publishing used it for the cover of Odes to Tools. In “Ode to Scythes,” I had written:

The scythes are emissaries
from a country
that no longer exists.

In fact, as I learned this past Saturday, that “country” is not completely vanished yet. The gentleman above, Martin Hardy, actually wielded those sythes (and also operated the butter churn, the grindstone and winnowing machine) as a boy back in the 1930s. His family lived in the old tenant house, the same house I live in now, for roughly the first four decades of the 20th century, living here year-round and looking after the farm while the absentee owners were in Chicago. To make ends meet, they grew oats, wheat, and other crops, kept a few dairy cows and sold the milk and cheese once a week in Tyrone. They stored the milk in the springhouse to keep it cool the rest of the week.

Though we’ve met many Plummer family descendents over the years, their attachment to the mountain is mainly a sentimental one. What memories they have are based on the few weeks they spent up here each summer. It was wonderful to meet a former year-round resident who actually grew up on the mountain the same as I did. Mr. Hardy was born in 1922, but he seems as if he could easily be 15 years younger. He recalled taking walks south along the mountain toward Altoona for fun, just as my brothers and I did, and like us, they kept chickens in the shed (the building behind him in the photo, which also houses the old tools). And while I have vivid memories of the Flood of ’72 (Hurricane Agnes), when we stood at a safe distance and watched floating trees slam into the decking of our access bridge over the Little Juniata, he remembered walking home from school during the Flood of ’36 and discovering that the bridge was completely gone. It was his grandfather, a skilled mason, who built the stone pediment that supports the present bridge, he said. It’s held up very well indeed.

I don’t think I ever shared this video for “Ode to Scythes,” the work of the British blogger and Buddhist priest Kaspalita. It was an unexpected gift, and very well executed, I thought — especially considering it was his first videopoem!

Mr. Hardy said they used a team of horses (one blind, the other sighted) to pull a mowing machine, and got out the scythes to mow the edges and the corners. I’ll bet our Amish neighbors in Sinking Valley still do much the same. I kind of question the poem’s premise now, in fact. A few decades from now, scythes may very well be common tools once again, and if any of us manage to live to 90, the tools people inquire about may not be hand tools, but things like iPads and the internet.

July 23, 2012July 23, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Of Nectar

This entry is part 21 of 47 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2012

After my first child was born, my mothers came to the hospital with a pot of clam broth.
Drink, drink, they urged; to let down the milk: so the child will suck of your nectar.

I didn’t know what it would feel like for my waters to break— Toward dawn, I dreamt
salt-smells from the sea. The sheets were soaked. Not mild, light hidden in night’s nectar.

Sometimes, one craves fish and rice, green mangoes, fermented shrimp. Other times,
nothing except yogurt: only what’s bland, nothing wild. Until the tongue misses nectar.

To this day it isn’t known who wrote that poison pen letter. Familiar diction; details
that couldn’t have been known, dredged up to revile— Clearly, someone denied nectar.

Most days I prefer savory to sweet: laurel or bay leaf, pink peppercorns, zest of ginger;
blend of cardamom and anise, piquant over mild. But it depends on who offers the nectar.

I pressed my forehead to glass to feel its cool aloofness; then against the weave of your
coat, the warmer folds of your nape. Don’t say memory denies the thickening of nectar.

Half my life is over, or only just begun. I’ve wished so long for a home of my own:
honeysuckle vines in the shade, stone patio tile; hummingbirds come to drink nectar.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

July 23, 2012February 25, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Hit the Lights

This entry is part 22 of 29 in the series Conversari

As long as the lights
stay on, we’re stuck.
You can’t sprout wings
or rake me with sudden claws.
I can’t turn into
a storm-tossed tree
or an otter slippery as sin.

In the light, we are
smaller than life.
Our cries are nothing
but failed words
& our sighs & gasps
might just as well
have been emitted by some
tired engine.

Light always wants
to pin us down,
to make nakedness into
a mere absence of clothes,
a sleight-of-hand devoid
of actual magic.
It strands us
in our separate flesh.

Hit the lights
& let’s get out of
this walled garden!
Let our bodies return
to their original habitat.
There’s a rusty gate
at the end of the path,
& the whole dark forest
just beyond.

See Rachel’s photographic response, “At the junction.”

July 22, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Visitations

This entry is part 20 of 47 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2012

Late afternoon, coming back from the store and planting three-dollar solar lights along the walk, we hear the night heron again from its nest in the tree: harsh, high-pitched squawks, yips almost like a feisty puppy’s at the end. We’ve seen four of them: skulking around our trash bin, or hanging around the fish pond in the neighbor’s yard. They bend their heads to the water, fluff out their wings, ripple them. And the river’s close— so we know they must forage for snails, small fish, fiddler crabs, along the shallows. Directly underneath where they roost, the pavement’s splattered grey and white like a Jackson Pollock. One of them comes so close, so suddenly, to the fence by the kitchen window— You look up and at first, there’s nothing there but the overgrown ivy; then one dark eye, glittering like a thieved ruby.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

July 22, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Goodreads

I finally got around to joining Goodreads, the social network for readers. If you’re a member, please send me a friend request. Here’s my author page.

Hard to say yet how I’ll use the site, but I don’t want to use it just to promote my own books. That would be really lame. So I’ve taken the time to add some favorite books to my virtual shelves there, identify a few favorite authors (some of whom, by sheer coincidence, also happen to be friends or fellow bloggers), and I hope to link to all my book reviews here at Via Negativa going forward. (It’s no longer a good idea to cross-post the full content of anything to multiple sites — the latest Google search algorithm penalizes that kind of behavior.)

I also imagine I’ll be using my Goodreads author blog from time to time to post stuff directly relating to the site or to my books. In fact, I have a post there now announcing that Breakdown: Banjo Poems is due out in September. As publication time nears, I’ll probably do a giveaway with a few of my 50 (!) free author’s copies. Pre-release book giveaways are apparently a pretty big deal at Goodreads, and they seem like a much cooler way to promote a new book than (for example) paying for an ad on the site.

July 21, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Intro to Lit

Then there was the semester when it seemed nothing we read or wrote or did or said in class, could move this one student. He always sat at the end of the first row in a sprawl, arms crossed, feet thrust out so others filing in or out of the room would have to take care not to stumble over them. When called on, either he refused to speak, shrugged or mumbled Beats me or I thought we were reading another story today so I don’t know about that one, causing much eye-rolling among his cohorts in the room. Until the afternoon we were discussing Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” and we had gotten to the part toward the end when Akaky, coming back from the office party, loses his overcoat to thugs on the bridge; and the months that follow, when the clerk languishes from illness in his poor rooms and dies. In the general discussion, this kid in class said, almost blasé— I don’t see what the big deal is: it’s just an overcoat— and something snapped in me. I can no longer remember exactly what I said, only that I flung words I’d hoped might— what? cut to the bone? move a stone? Perhaps I cast on lines about privilege or empathy, something about the way stories are knitted to real life. But in every new class, with every new student, he’s there and we are all Akaky’s ghost: the story’s his, the story’s ours, from its collar of cat fur down to its tailored hems. The casting-on, the fitting isn’t where it begins, but in some prior intention we don’t often know until we rip the parts back to the rib to see how the toothed patterns helix and grow.

In response to Via Negativa: Reading the Icelandic Sagas.

July 20, 2012December 8, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Reading the Icelandic Sagas

This entry is part 21 of 29 in the series Conversari

The difficult syllables clash
in my mouth. Your knitting
needles make short
work of the yarn,
like the dream-woman
who gave An Twig-Belly
his nickname, filling
his disemboweled gut
with a tangle of twigs
until his intestines could
be put back where
they belonged, in all
their tortuous windings.
We puzzle through
the genealogies, struggle
to picture the raw land
rising behind the words,
yet somehow these grim stories
bring us closer together.
Young men described
as promising will end up
wallowing in each other’s gore—
we know this.
Beautiful women will goad
their thin-skinned mates
into horrific acts.
A shepherd boy is smashed
against the ground so hard
his spine snaps, & two years
after his miraculous rescue
An Twig-Belly dies
a quick & needless death,
split by an unheroic sword.
You frown at your knitting
& decide it too needs
to be unraveled. I watch
the dark garment which was
to have been mine dissolve
in your expert fingers.
You smile.
I feel light as air.

See Rachel’s photographic response: “Seed.”

July 20, 2012December 8, 2013 by Luisa A. Igloria

You will have to do things you have never done before

Recalculate the seasons. Rewrite The Farmer’s Almanac. Research new forms of lightning vanes for multi-forked strikes. High, thin and cold cover of cirrus clouds: find out how to thin them more. Falling sunlight, melting ice. The pull of gravity reaching deep into the bones. And yes, there are days when nothing seems to work, and I don’t know how to comfort you. I try to remember what my grandmother said about herbs and hallucinogenics: which leaves, when chewed, bring on a clammy sweat and which, when pounded into paste, lead one briefly to clear water in the middle of a lake. Lying beneath a black sky you might feel the tremors beginning again under the earth. It is a hundred degrees, close to midnight. A fig tree at the edge of the field has put forth a few small knobs of fruit. Swelling out like hips, not quite ripe yet; but how sadly erotic they are. Winds like knives slash at the topmost parts of trees. Months ago, most of the water found exit hatches. Silvery rivulets drained into the ground, leaving their dry calligraphy behind.

In response to small stone (110) and What the Night Horse Said.

July 19, 2012 by Luisa A. Igloria

Throttle Ghazal

This entry is part 19 of 47 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2012

In the heart of the downtown section, a stretch of cobblestone streets:
they stop motorists from gunning through them at full throttle.

Don’t put the cart before the horse, don’t jump from the frying
pan into the fire: in other words, don’t go at full throttle.

Who finds caution in the wind? Who gleans the stitches
from the timid rhyme? Not the young, going at full throttle.

In the school parking lot, I skirt the second speed bump when I can. They’re there
for a reason, says the youngest daughter: to keep you from going full throttle.

On my bookshelf is a History of Doubt, filled with stories of ancient thinkers and
medieval cynics: anyone who might have said Not so fast, not at full throttle.

Who pays heed anymore? Three birds in succession thunk against the glass. Which
one is pursuer, which pursued? Danger and excitement. Dance at full throttle.

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

July 18, 2012July 24, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Pandora

This entry is part 20 of 29 in the series Conversari

for RR

Pandora was a doll with a plastic head
& a boneless fabric body full of give.
Her eyes were a smiling blue
you scraped with a thumbnail one day
to see what lay beneath: blank plastic.
Pandora was a doll with plastic arms
that could be bent into the semblance
of a hug. From a high perch
she watched the bears multiply
on the bed, expert listeners,
burly avatars of comfort. When
the circus master’s mad wife
came to give them all away
to charity, Pandora alone
with her hopeless eye was spared.
You wept until you couldn’t see
& wailed until your voice turned
to a whisper; the bears stayed gone.
Your sad box of a room
held only Pandora.

See Rachel’s response: “Eye (seeing, being)“