Posts

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The driveway walnut tree

the-driveway-black-walnut

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, I decided to shoot some pictures of the black walnut tree in question. It had rained off and on, but the sun came out while I was shooting, making everything glow and glisten. In processing, I tried switching to black-and-white and found I preferred that for almost all the photos, with the possible exception of the one above. Here’s a slideshow of the set, which requires Flash, meaning that if you’re on an iPhone or iPad, you won’t be able to watch it. However, this is best viewed on a large monitor — once it starts playing, click the four-arrows icon at bottom right to expand it to full-screen. (If you’re on dial-up, it’s probably easiest to browse the set, and if you’re reading this via email or in a feed reader, you’ll probably have to click through to view the slideshow.)

The photo with my hand in it shows what I believe is the scar from our long-ago Frisbee attack. Usually black walnuts that sustain damage to a terminal bud end up forking, but this one did not. A single bud became the new main stem.

Black walnut wood is prized by furniture makers, and the supply is relatively scarce because the trees grow slowly once they start to get big. As these photos and yesterday’s post suggest, however, they grow quite rapidly in their first few decades. My feeling is once they start bearing nuts, that takes so much out of them that they don’t have much energy left to channel into wood. Consider they remain leafless for roughly seven and half months of the year at our latitude, not leafing out until early June, and the very woody nuts are always plentiful — I don’t think pollination ever fails.

The yard of my parents’ house is dominated by black walnuts, which might not seem like a good thing given their legendary inhospitabilty toward certain other plants, which can’t tolerate the chemical juglone exuded by black walnut leaves, husks and roots. However, for birdwatchers like my mom, they’re ideal because they leaf out so late and lose their leaves so early. When migrating warblers move through the yard, she has no trouble spotting them.

As for the walnuts, they are a bit of an acquired taste and a lot of work to remove from the shells, requiring a sledgehammer and extensive use of a nutpick. The hulls — source of the ink my friend Alison is so fond of — are easy enough to remove, but you have to wear gloves. If you don’t, as we didn’t when we were kids, you tend to provoke comments like, “Hey Bonta! Did you’ns run out toilet paper?” Kids can be cruel. These days, we find it much easier just to buy a jar of pre-shelled black walnuts for a couple dollars from the local Amish whenever we need some, so the squirrels up here feed very well.

Gray squirrels are scatter hoarders, and it’s their burying of the walnuts all around the yards and meadow that’s responsible for most of the new trees — those few that get past the deer (or boys with Frisbees). In the book North American Tree Squirrels, mammalogist Michael J. Steele recounts some of the strategies gray squirrels use to keep other squirrels from discovering their walnuts, including digging a couple fake burial sites in a row before finally burying the walnut for real if other squirrels are watching. I also once watched a squirrel excavate a walnut that had been buried about a foot down, clean it all off, then dig another hole a yard away and re-bury it. I suspect it thought another squirrel had watched the initial bury.

The most amazing fact about this behavior to me is that the squirrels rely on memory alone to recover hundreds of nuts, even when they’re buried under an additional foot or more of snow and ice. Steele has calculated that a squirrel digging a black walnut out of the frozen ground on a bitter cold January day, then chiseling through the rock-hard shell, expends more energy than it gets back from eating the nut. Hence, I suppose, the frequent raids on the birdfeeder to make up the deficit.

Don’t forget to submit tree-related links to the Festival of the Trees monthly blog carnival (deadline: September 30). The next edition will be at europeantrees — and we are still looking for a host of the following (Nov. 1st) edition.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Goal-oriented

There’s a black walnut tree beside the driveway that my brothers and I tried to kill one spring evening when we were teenagers and it was just a seedling. Now it drops fat green planetary objects from 50 or even 70 feet up, another one landing on the old cracked tarmac every so often with a heavy thunk, like a worn-out clock that has forgotten how to toll. But the tree’s in the prime of youth; it is I, the one-time would-be assassin, who has turned decrepit. I have a fan in a little cage that I turn on my face in the heat of the summer, and for most of the other three seasons, my bony knees remain cold no matter how many layers I wrap them in. The falling walnuts remind me not of harvest-time and blessings as they should, but of all the projects I’ve abandoned, including love, reproduction, a career, the whole matter of being a useful citizen.

It should be noted that we have plenty of squirrels, so sometimes the walnuts don’t fall on their own; they are pushed. Maybe the squirrels are simply clumsy, and drop the nuts by accident. But I’ve watched them do it, and I have to say I think they relish the sound of a walnut connecting with its unmissable target the earth, like bored kids with a frisbee aiming for the terminal bud of a tree seedling at the edge of the yard, and shouting with triumph when a lucky throw shaves it bald.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

What We Look For

This entry is part 5 of 63 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2011

The cloud in search of lightning, the cloth
seeking the thunderous rip across the grain.

Gold leaf on a frame peeling away like ruin;
sorrow’s name written long across the water.

The keyhole’s outline of the beautiful one: that speck
waving, moving closer from the padlocked garden.

The cup on the table awaiting radiant downpour;
vessel poised for the tilt of the river’s skin.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Dear nostalgia,

This entry is part 4 of 63 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2011

you are the last lingering tomato plant that never
flowered through the dry summer, only pushed
yellow-green stems up through the cone trellis,
pretending its goal was succulence—

you are a broody sky the color of the cast
iron pot in my childhood home, in which
we boiled rice and only rice; beneath its lid,
an army of uniformly spaced beads of moisture—

you are the rusted orange marks against the sides
of the old garage, which tell how high the waters
rose in the flood of ___; and sheets of heavy
plastic someone couldn’t bear to throw away—

you are the night heron we’ve sighted in the shade
of the garbage bin, beside the neighbor’s wall
trailing ivy and white asterisks of jasmine;
where is it you go, when we don’t see you?

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Encore

This entry is part 3 of 63 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2011

Sunday evening, and they come up the front
walk: the same lanky guy sporting an unkempt
mustache, dented baseball cap, t-shirt

and loose canvas shorts; and somewhere
on the periphery, his henchman ready
with props— a folding ladder

and clear plastic bag half-filled
with leaves and assorted debris. Their
modus operandi: some weekend

in early spring or fall, go up and down
the row houses, claiming to be “back”
to service gutters and downspouts

that need cleaning, like they’ve “always
done”. Someone told me Rob and Alma down
the way gave them sixty dollars in March

after they clattered around a bit on their
deck, showed them the bag of fake detritus
from their roof, then disappeared. What’s

even more mind-boggling is that they
come back to the same neighborhoods, season
after season— either they’re not very smart,

or are brazenly confident they won’t be
recognized. My ten year old, who saw them
the first time they came around two years ago,

rightly observed their ladder could barely
clear the second-floor windows. She said,
How do you think they could even get up

to the roof? But here they are, punching
the doorbell and peering through the blinds again:
I bet they’re getting ready to gesture toward

the slate-grey shingles, spin the same old spiel—
like a pair of mosquitos that keep coming back to buzz
in your ear, just when you’re about to fall asleep.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Eating Dried Fish With Our Hands

This entry is part 2 of 63 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2011

Tonight, this kitchen is not a place
the foreign or the faint of heart
would willingly choose to enter:

I’ve fried a panful of air-dried, salted,
and butterflied fish (is that why we hear
the wail of the neighbor’s cat, or is it merely

in heat?)— So what if the smoky haze sits
thick in the air, is likely seeping through
windows, clinging to drapes and furniture?

I’ve sliced three plum tomatoes to toss
with a squirt of lime, chopped scallions
and a handful of cilantro. All this,

because the homesick tongue has dreamt
thin, golden crumbs of fish dipped in
a saucerful of vinegar, crushed garlic,

and bird’s eye chillies; followed by
a mouthful of hot jasmine rice scooped
up with the fingers. Why is feasting

on and touching this simple food such
a pleasure? Mornings, we have a little
hail of cereal grains hitting the sides

of the bowl; then the thin, cold
stream of milk. Lunch is often skipped,
in favor of coffee. And how many times

can the trio of salad, meat, and potatoes
exercise their dinner charms? The stove
flicks on, the bottom of the pan heats

to a coppery red. Sometimes the hungry,
rusted parts of memory call out for more
salt, more tang: more time to linger.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The Origin of the Exclamation Mark

This entry is part 2 of 34 in the series Small World

A gasper, a screamer,
a dog’s cock, say
the old type-setters,
frozen at point.
But it’s older than
type, old as a dried
stalk trembling on
the way to earth,
a mud-dauber tube
like a tuneless flute,
the trail of a slug
down the moss face
of a cliff, a severed
finger packed in ice,
a No. 2 pencil pocked
with toothmarks, a
snake made of sand,
a microphone hung
from the ceiling,
the fossilized thigh-
bone of an extinct
sauropod, a string
of drilled shells
used in lieu of
money, or a
gas flare on
an oil field
at night.

Legend
says: the word
joy written vertically,
in Latin, a big letter I
balancing on a
full belly.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Listening to Piazzolla’s Tango Etudes

This entry is part 1 of 63 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Autumn 2011

Sinuous braid of trenchant longings,
windmill footwork criss-crossing

the polished floor then pausing to slide
and wrap— dark stockinged thigh and leg

seething with friction, that bow
ascending toward the edge of oblivion

and driving the breath, before its sudden
drop— O I’m the crimson petal

that detaches from its ebony nest of hair,
tight gather of pleats fanned off

a narrow waist; velvet cummerbund that pins
the white sleeves close as sails—

Outside, see how late afternoon rain
beats down and street lamps flare;

how leaves of the yellowest birch reflect
ardent bronze shimmer on window-panes.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Kay Ryan on nonsense, poetry, and knowledge


Watch on Vimeo. The Lannan Foundation has also uploaded a video of the reading that directly preceded the conversation.

I usually share other people’s videos only on Facebook or (for poetry-related stuff) Moving Poems, but the length and via negativistic content of this conversation might make it a better fit here, I thought. I love what Kay Ryan has to say about poetry and knowing, and about knowing and making stuff up. You have to watch the video to really get a feel for how unseriously she takes herself, but I spent some time this morning making a transcript of a few of my favorite parts of this conversation, which occur somewhere near the middle. This helps me understand a little bit better what I do myself in my writing — especially the part about the need for coldness.

*

Kay Ryan: “I think nonsense is extremely close to poetry. Nonsense — I figured this out when I was fairly young — nonsense operates by rules. You cannot have nonsense outside the context of sense. It, uh — it’s in tension with sense.”

Atsuro Riley: “You like to make a statement in your poetry. You’re quite willing to do it, you like to do it, you seem insistent upon it — ”

Ryan: “A lot of them are bogus, though. They’re bogus. You know. I like the fake — I think you pointed this out! — the sort of, you know, the pedant, the mock polemic. Yeah. And they’re just ridiculous, you know. Like uh, oh, what’s the one about the, uh, extraordinary lengths… Oh yeah, right — I don’t know, uh, ‘Extraordinary lengths are always accompanied by extraordinary distances.’ And, you know, that’s just such a stupid thing to say! I just love to say something like that. I, uh —

“Well, let me explain that. I like to make — well, boy, I’m glad you brought that up. Because I, I think that I’m really interested in something that is so hard to perceive. Like light coming from the furthest star. It’s, it’s, it’s very frail when it gets here. Very frail. But looked at another way, it’s incredibly strong, ’cause it’s gotten all the way here from the furthest star. So it’s something incredible strong, but we’re getting just a little bit of it!

“So what I do, what I try to do with this thing that I can just barely perceive, is to jack up the intensity like crazy. Make a cartoon out of it? You know. Make a diorama, have puppets do it. You know — overdo it. I’ve gotta magnify it because it’s — and I have to sound more sure than I am. Because — because I don’t know. I only a teeny tiny bit know! Maybe. I’m trying to know. So I build up — I build something that I hope has a lot of, uh — well, as my step-daughter would say, flavor-punch. I like flavor-punch. I love Southwestern food! But I like to give a lot of color. And reality. Of course it’s all specious, but, uh, you know — ”

Riley: “But to help you think through the question.”

Ryan: “To help me think, yeah. It’s like setting up — and I think you said, too — ”

Riley: “Magnified conundra.”

Ryan: “Yeah. And little, uh, models. You know? Einstein — and I always like to connect myself with Einstein! — Einstein, you know, worked in the patent office. Before he was — before he thought his really great thoughts. And I think it shaped his mind to a certain degree. That business of seeing in terms of models. And I think that that’s what we do in poems. (I mean, not just me, but — ) We make a model, and it’s really a model for something different. I mean, this is the model, but it’s really trying to talk about that starlight somehow. That little thing we just know with some interior part of our brain, to which we have very little access.”

Riley: “Let’s talk about coldness. What is it in a poem — I’m not sure I exactly understand — and, um, why do you like it?”

Ryan: “Well, I mean I think it’s just constitutional. I think — I think one of the things that we do when we write, or one of the things I’ve done, is try to make a world I could live in. You know? I make in my poems a world that is, uh, congenial to me. ‘I like how she thinks!’ You know? It makes me feel at ease to articulate those things. It, uh — I can make a world that has the rules that I want. And I think that, as most people here [in the audience are], I am sensitive. I feel under… I am too stimulated. There’s too much coming in all the time. There’s too much heat. There’s too much closeness. There’s too much personal. There’s too much giving away of secrets. There’s not enough, ah, distance. There’s not enough chill. And if I can do my small part to add a little coldness and distance to the world, I will not have written in vain.”

[…]

Ryan: “I discovered a long time ago — and it seems so counter-intuitive, but I found that I had to start writing about things when I was just on the front edge of knowing about them. I mean, just — I hardly knew about them. If I waited, I would be paralyzed by knowing too much. And I, I couldn’t write. There always has to be a large sense of, ‘Oh, I’m just inventing this.’ But then later you can look back and say, ‘No actually I wasn’t inventing it. I still think that I, that there’s something there that I will stick with.’ But I always have to write it before. And if I’m overwhelmed by knowledge, or feeling, or something, it’s just no — I just can’t write.”