Dragonflies

cattails

What if every mirror had a dragonfly in it?

cellophane wings 1

What if after years in the mud we graduated not to swimming but to flight?

red dragon

What if the ground were as translucent as the water, & every step brought us closer to the sky?

The Alchemy of Anger


Alchemy of Anger from Dave Bonta on Vimeo.

I hadn’t planned on making another snake video poem so soon after the last one, but I got some great footage of a northern water snake yesterday on a visit to a friend’s hunting camp, and the poem came to me this morning. The reading here might be a little over the top; I decided to try reading through clenched teeth.

(Transcript)

Whatever burns in the airless ooze of my gut,
it’s far from fire. If red be its color,
it’s the toxic red of cinnabar.
It churns. It gurgles. It ties itself in knots.

Anger is an acid, altering everything it touches.
Vitriol, the alchemists called it:
mixed with common salt, it produces
gastric acid, which those ardent
scientists of the soul revered as spirits of salt.

Ah, to think that their philosopher’s stone,
granter of base wishes,
might be glimmering at the end
of such tortuous metamorphoses!
The Alkahest, universal solvent, so wondrously corrosive
nothing could ever hold it in.

Rat Snake


Rat Snake from Dave Bonta on Vimeo.

Several times a year, a black rat snake climbs the black walnut tree out back to get in my house and eat the rodents, for which I’m grateful. This video poem depicts its latest entrance.

(Transcript)

We were just talking about you crooked tunnel

the way you funnel your long freight up the walnut tree serpent

& glide out along one diminishing limb until you reach the roof
drop into the gutter & loop into a squirrel hole above the kitchen

We’d just found one of your old skins snagged on a thorn
I don’t think he’s coming back for it I joked

And my neighbor glances up into the tree & says
Well there he is now

And there you were son of a bitch
still & heavy as a tongue with bad news

waiting for a signal neither of us caught
to set you back into motion into path into limbless dragon
flicking your soft Y of flame

*

Don’t forget to submit tree-related blog posts and photosets to the Festival of the Trees blog carnival, which next month will be hosted for the first time by an India-based blog, Trees, Plants, and more. Details on how to submit are here.

Beta versions

SCENE: The local brewpub at happy hour, back corner of the bar.

COMPUTER GEEK: Wow, he sounds just like my ex-husband: good for a while, until you start to notice all the glaring imperfections. Total alpha.

BIOLOGIST: Oh yeah, mine too! Everything had to be done his way, didn’t matter what it was. Alpha male if there ever was one.

COMPUTER GEEK: Tell me about it. The quicker I adjusted every fucking thing to his modus operandi, the smoother things went. For a while. If I kept my eyes shut and put my fingers in my ears.

BIOLOGIST: Yup. And of course the problem is I’m a bit of an alpha myself, and he couldn’t handle that. Called me the the b-word to my face.

COMPUTER GEEK: Don’t be too hard on yourself! You don’t strike me as an alpha at all, though I suppose we’re all a little rough around the edges. Still, I like to think of myself more as a beta… and that’s definitely what I’m looking for in my next man. Must. Be. In. Beta.

BIOLOGIST: Well, I’ll go along with that! I’m definitely looking for a beta this time around. But I don’t mind admitting that’s because I’m an alpha. Someone has to be! Who’d keep all the betas in line, otherwise? Not all alphas are bad — just the ones that, you know, aren’t any good. (Laughs)

COMPUTER GEEK: Oh, well, I guess that’s true. Can’t have a beta without an alpha!

BIOLOGIST: Exactly.

COMPUTER GEEK: Still, don’t you think that, ideally, we should expect to get a little better at this each time? Relationships, I mean. I’d hate to think that anyone’s just stuck in an alpha version forever, doomed to make the mistakes with the same kinds of men over and over.

BIOLOGIST: Are you saying the beta pattern represents progress? I hadn’t thought about it that way before. To me, they’re just different ways of interacting, different social styles. But you’re right, come to think of it. As they get older, every alpha does eventually become an beta, or worse.

COMPUTER GEEK: Worse? You mean better! The beta stage is when you start to get real public participation, assuming we’re a public beta. The more people you have testing you out, the faster you’ll improve.

BIOLOGIST: I guess that’s one way of looking at it. Age certainly does mellow us out — or wear us down, I’m not sure which! And I’m intrigued by this idea that the beta stage is actually what we’re designed for. Some of the new research on human aging does tend to back that up. I think traditionally we’ve just been so focused on the reproductive stage that we’ve tended to ignore the vital social roles of, for example, non-breeding females.

COMPUTER GEEK: (warily) I’m not sure reproduction is quite the metaphor I’d use, but whatever. The important thing is that you have a pretty flexible architecture to begin with. If someone’s stuck in alpha, they just aren’t reaching their full potential.

INVESTOR (two stools down): I’m sorry, ladies, I couldn’t help overhearing a little of your conversation. I have to say I am fascinated by your interpretation of alpha and beta values!

(Biologist snorts)

I’ve always been told that you should go for a high alpha and a low beta, but it sounds like you’re saying the exact opposite! What other performance factors do you look at?

COMPUTER GEEK: Well, uh, it depends. Some people just look at adoption rate, but I’m a purist: I’m looking for elegance, I’m looking for simplicity, I’m looking for ease of use…

INVESTOR: (slides over to the adjacent stool) Tell me more!

BIOLOGIST: (in a loud mutter) Why the hell are males always so obsessed with performance? Do you have any fucking idea what we were talking about?

“Twitter for poets”: poetry and conversation in Identica

Identica LogoOver at Identica — the open-source, feature-rich microblogging service which I greatly prefer to the faddish Twitter — I’m collaborating on a chain poem with librarian-blogger Patricia Anderson. It’s probably still quite a few days from completion, but those with an interest in the creative process and/or in social media and micromessaging technology might be interested in following the poem’s slow progress.

Twitter users will notice right away that they’re not in Kansas anymore. Up until a few weeks ago, each reply to another Identica user had a Twitter-like “in reply to” link at the bottom, and you could only follow conversations by clicking backward from one such link to another. But now, as the official description of the latest version of the underlying Laconica software puts it:

Related notices are organized into conversations, with each reply a branch in a tree. Conversations have pages and are linked to from each notice in the conversation.

In the current styling, each nested level is a slightly darker shade of gray, so that a back-and-forth between two people resembles an inverted staircase descending into darkness. A perfect medium for poetry!

Actually, I had wanted to have staggered verses, which would entail replying each time to the other person’s earliest post in the conversation, but Patricia wanted to let the conversation proceed naturally and keep nesting deeper with each reply instead. The poem can end, she suggested, at the point where replies no longer nest. We’re not sure exactly when that will be, but we should have at least another week at our current rate of one or two posts per day. I proposed the topic: “in the news,” with regular images drawn from current, international news stories. You can see our conversation about the poetic conversation — the meta-poem — here.

This is, as far as I know, the first collaborative poem in Identica written to take advantage of the conversations feature, though earlier collaborations, such as this one between Carolee and Blythe, have been threaded retroactively. I imagine that when we’re done, we’ll repost the entire conversation at Open Micro, so I’m not too worried about keeping the thread free of non-poetry replies. In fact, I thought it was pretty cool when an Identica user from Ukraine — Kobzahrai, whom I got to know initially as a fellow member of the blues group — responded appreciatively to my opening sally about the strange mayor of Kiev.

Identica has a small but active poetry community, lured there by such features as groups and favorite notices. Belonging to groups such as poetry, writers, haiku, or lyrics can greatly help reduce the noise-to-signal ratio in your feed, because you don’t need to subscribe to someone who writes 90 percent of the time about Ubuntu, for example, just to see their occasional haiku. And while Twitter also allows you to save favorite posts by other users, only Identica notifies you when someone favors one of your posts. The six most popular posts of the day appear at the top of the sidebar on the front page of Identica, and a longer compendium of currently popular posts is one click away. And perhaps because we poetry fans are inveterate word-hoarders, we probably “favorite” things more often than other users, giving an impression to casual visitors that Identica is — as someone once told Evan Prodromou, the lead developer — “Twitter for poets.”

Incidentally, if you follow me on Twitter and are wondering why you’re not seeing my half of our collaborative poem there, too, that’s because I’ve elected not to send my “@” replies across the automatic bridge that Identica provides.* Most Twitter folks already struggle to make sense of a morass of atomized messages, and I don’t see any point in subjecting them to additional fragments. Twitter is increasingly about broadcasting anyway; “power users” compete to see who can acquire the most followers, with whom conversations will generally be limited to one-way exercises in “crowd sourcing.” If you want true conversation, group-enabled camaraderie, or poems longer than 140 characters (multi-authored renga? Ballads? Epics?) Identica is the place to be.
__________

*The lead developers of Identica are committed to an open microblogging protocol, which if ever fully adopted would mean that users of competing micromessaging services would be able to subscribe and reply to each other without leaving their own service, just as we now do with competing email services. The people who run Twitter, like AOL and Comcast in days of yore, don’t seem to see the need to give their users that freedom, so Twitter is still essentially a silo.

Livestock

goat tree

Enormous oak
the daylight moon in its branches
a goat at its foot

Valentine cow

Holstein with a heart
in the middle of her forehead
loves the salt lick

horse piss

Horses in the shade
of a weeping willow
a cascade of piss

I am an enemy combatant

It’s a scene straight out of The Gulag Archipelago:

Some of the poems written by inmates were first scrawled in toothpaste on Styrofoam cups or etched into the cups with small stones, since in their first year of captivity the prisoners were not allowed to use pen and paper.

Any poem found by prison guards was confiscated and usually destroyed, the former prisoners say. …

Authorities explained why the military has been slow to declassify the poems … arguing that inmates could use the works to pass coded messages to other militants outside. …

Hundreds of poems remain suppressed by the military … [which] believes that their original Arabic or Pashto versions represent an enhanced security risk.

[A military spokesman said] they have attempted to use this medium as merely another tool in their battle of ideas … [He] had not, at the time, read the poems.

The prisoners remain entirely cut off from the world: military censors excise all references to current events from the occasional letters allowed from family members, and lawyers may not tell prisoners any personal or general news unless it directly relates to their cases. Indeed, dozens of prisoners have attempted suicide by hanging, by hoarding medicine and then overdosing, or by slashing their wrists.

The military, in typical Orwellian fashion, has described these suicide attempts as incidents of “manipulative self-injurious behavior.”

This is, however, not Soviet Russia, or China, or North Korea. It’s the limbo known as Guantanamo Bay.

We truly are a nation of chickenshits. Like Jon Stewart, I was baffled by the apoplectic reaction of members of Congress to the idea that men accused of terrorism be housed in maximum security prisons “on American soil,” as the inevitable expression has it. But I guess most politicians from both parties recognized a golden opportunity to grandstand and play on their constituents’ xenophobia without running the risk of being accused of racism.

We are afraid of scary foreign invaders, perhaps because most of us are ourselves the descendents of scary foreign invaders, armed with what they took for God’s blessing on their project of theft, slavery, and genocide.

We are afraid of foreign languages and the people who speak them. What are they saying about us? Are they chanting spells to turn the cows’ milk sour and make the crops wither? Though many minority communities have preserved their languages for generations without ill effect, and evidence abounds that bilingual people are, if anything, more adaptable and imaginative than monolingual people, we continue to see linguistic diversity as a threat.

We are afraid of poetry, and suspicious of the people who write it. Why do they have to write in code? Why can’t they just come out and say what they mean? If they’re men, why can’t they engage in more manly pursuits, like playing with their firearms or watching professional wrestling?

We are afraid of ideas, and suspicious of the people who enjoy engaging with them. We seem to agree with Big Brother in 1984 that Ignorance is Strength.

We are afraid of true freedom and what it might lead to. We excel in the building of prisons and the construction of tortured logic to support our continued exploitation of global resources, natural and human. We are — as the amateur Yemeni poet in the article says — artists of insults and humiliation. We falsely conflate freedom with ownership, which is to say, slavery.

We are, above all, afraid of the truth. Even more so than most other peoples, Americans enjoy being lied to, as evidenced by our insatiable appetite for advertising and spin. The rare politician who dares to point out certain obvious truths, such as the fact that we can’t have our cake and eat it too, is quickly out of a job. The current president got the position mainly because of his ability to sound sincere while delivering vacuous, feel-good platitudes… and because he hugely outspent his opponent on advertising. And despite promising to close Guantanamo Bay, our Liar-in-Chief now himself endorses indefinite detention. A trial might reveal too many dangerous or uncomfortable truths.

I say “we” and “our,” but of course I am not really one of us, but one of them. Like the Guantanomo prisoners, I too weave coded messages into my poems, layers of meaning without which they would cease to be poems — or indeed to convey anything of the truth, which is usually complex, often paradoxical, and always inimical to the interests of the powerful. Though I don’t often mention it, figuring that surreptitious campaigns have a greater chance of success than open ones, I am engaged in a battle of ideas with those who believe that War is (or can ever lead to) Peace and the rest of it. Like the indefinite detainees, I resort to poetry because without it I believe I would go mad or commit suicide. I am an enemy combatant.

Vespicide

A newly discovered yellow jacket nest under my porch must be destroyed. The decision has been made before anyone has even laid eyes on it; removing the lattice-work to take a look would be hazardous. Dozens of hornets come zipping out at the slightest vibration — a heavy tread above their heads, for example — so we figure it must be big. It seems to be right over the door to the furnace, so there’s no question it has to go, and the sooner the better, before it grows enormous. I resolve to do it tonight, after dark.

The prospect of killing an entire colony isn’t something I relish, though I’ve done it before. A feeling of dread settles in the pit of my stomach. I go for an evening walk around the trails.

skull bolete 1

In the woods on the crest of Laurel Ridge I spy what looks like the top of a human skull resting on the moss: an enormous, bone-yellow bolete. I stand looking down at it for a while, and it’s almost an out-of-body experience.

A scolding blue jay finally snaps me out of it. It’s not clear if it’s scolding me or some other large predator, so I stand for a while longer, listening and alert.

A couple hundred feet away on another trail, a few clumps of the aptly named black trumpet mushroom are silhouetted against the moss, poised as if to herald the coming night. I consider harvesting them — they’re delicious — but decide instead to leave them alone and return the next morning with a camera.

black trumpet 2

It’s nearly dark when I get back. I fetch a large coffee can from the basement of my parents’ house and put a splash of gasoline on the bottom, then find a sturdy piece of cardboard and a box of kitchen matches. I carry it all down to the yard in front of the porch, set up a dim lantern, and gingerly remove the lattice. I can see immediately that my tried-and-true method of placing a can over the nest and quickly sliding in a cardboard lid, severing the nest’s overhead attachment, won’t work this time. The nest isn’t going to fit in the can — it’s already almost as big as my head. What’s more, it appears to be securely attached to the beam behind it.

yellow jacket nest

Plan B is simpler and more brutal. Dad mentioned he had a can of wasp and ant spray, so I go fetch that, instead: d-trans Allethrin. Rainbow brand.

Fortunately, it’s a cool night — the temperature is already in the low 50s — so resistance should be minimal. I direct a long blast of the insecticide into the opening of the nest from about two feet away, then stand back. An eerie, high-pitched boiling sound ensues. Imagine all the inhabitants of a paper city shrieking in unison. I stand in the dark listening for three or four minutes until it dies away.

The next morning, only a single hornet circles the nest, which I examine in daylight for the first time. It’s beautiful, if you can ignore the small corpses clogging the entrance. It would make a fine lampshade, I think.