Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
Something burns somewhere: faint
hickory smudge carried on the air,
woodsmoke and leaf crackle. Against
the sky’s blue scroll, sleeves of green
donned a few more times before winter’s
coming. Half-covered in leaves,
one deer snorts to another. They
turn; one white-tufted beacon, then
the other— relays raised aloft
at the edge of the field.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Walking through a dark forest without a flashlight is an exercise in trust: trusting your feet to find the trail, trusting chance not to place a new fallen tree at shin level, trusting that a storm won’t blow in — for there’s no hurrying this slow shuffle. Over the chanting crowd of katydids in the trees, I hear the thin, whispery alarm calls of flying squirrels. I stop and peer at an almost vertical row of glowing spots a few feet off the trail: foxfire.
The damp air is an olfactory smorgasbord of molds and fermentation. As my eyes adjust, I begin to discern different flavors of darkness, too: here the rich black shadows of trees, there the cafe-au-lait openings of trail or blow-down. I feel less helpless now, more in control. But no sooner do my feet and eyes grow accustomed to their new normal state than the restless mind is off again, and I have to keep calling it back: Heel! Stay!
Is it loneliness that prompts it to wander like that? If I were sharing this darkness with others right now — say, outside a federal penitentiary in Georgia, cupping a candle flame — would I be better able to maintain focus? If instead of myself I were, in fact, concentrating all my thoughts on some victim of the criminal injustice system on his last, too-short walk into permanent darkness, wouldn’t my own hopes and dreams fade into the background, as faint as foxfire?
The sound of a very small shower approaches. I take my hat off to relish the tap of its millipede feet on my close-cropped scalp, but it’s already past. An odd reaction, perhaps — a sign that, deep down, I might still crave another’s touch.
Somehow I find the brushy intersection where the Short Way Trail leads down off the ridge, and soon I am seeing a light among the trees. Look, nobody’s home! Blinking dots of light in the window where an ethernet unit sends and receives from a world-wide web.
And how is it, I wonder as I enter the house, that I managed to walk all that way without blundering into a single spider web? The equinox may not be until Friday, but autumn is already here. Or as the book of Jeremiah puts it: The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.
Rest in peace, Troy Davis.
So as luck would have it, the Juniata Valley Audubon Society‘s first lawsuit is happening under my watch as president — this despite the fact that in my personal life I avoid confrontation like the plague. Fortunately I’m not the point-man here, and today I was happy to use my presidential authority merely to insist upon shooting a video of the real heroes of this fight (as well as to record some audio, which I hope to share eventually as a Woodrat Podcast episode).
The video wasn’t very eptly shot, but what the heck. It’s JVAS’s first official video, and I figure we have to start somewhere. It features Mollie Matteson, Conservation Advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, and Stan Kotala, JVAS Conservation Chair, member of the Pennsylvania Biological Survey’s Herpetological Technical Committee, and general bad-ass.
beat pouring through the sound system
of this corner cafe, something in my
blood rises immediately to the warmth
of syllables that alternately quicken
(darting hummingbirds among the green)
then lengthen, humid as afternoons swung
from hammocks against the setting sun.
Even if I don’t understand the words
crooned in Portuguese, they unloose
the languid locked in my wrists,
the small of my back, the tight
ladders knotted in my spine.
The low cloud ceiling suspended
over this day transforms into sultry
stage setting: the gloom no longer
somber, only achingly melancholy;
the isolated call and response
amid the trees querulous, perhaps
even occasionally sweet— and
in between, those rich, syncopated
silences of expectation and release.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
When I turn on the radio I hear
the story of a dead NASA satellite
about as large as a schoolbus,
which is right this minute falling
to earth and poised to burn in re-entry,
scattering a rain of hefty debris
some time in the next few days.
Where exactly on the six inhabited
continents it will land is anybody’s
guess: though all the wags have
already suggested locations anywhere
from Downing Street to Alaska, to the White
House and Libya. The odds, however,
are about one in 21 trillion that any
of us will be struck by a scrapyard
piece that has actually hurtled
through fields of quietly pulsing stars.
In a manner of speaking, that satellite
has been falling since it was launched
into the atmosphere in 1991, in the same
way mold begins its inevitable descent
upon the wheels of cheese just
lifted out of their cloth, the coarse
brown bricks of bread the baker
slides out of the oven. Even now,
though the season has not truly turned,
the walnut trees have begun to lose
their leaves. The smallest animals
are lining their nests with seed and paste,
preparing to bury themselves in the dark.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Meadow Vole, Field Mouse, or Meadow Mouse (Microtus pennsylvanicus)
“…he led them up the mountain’s brow,
And shews them all the shining fields below.
They wind the hill, and thro’ the blissful meadows go.”
— Virgil, Aeneid (6.641)[16]
Dear meadow vole disappearing into the woods
in the jaws of a cat who holds her head high
and does not slink, perhaps it is unwarranted
to think of assigning you the role of gladiator
borne away in death, departing through fronds
of grass toward Elysium. But couldn’t I
imagine you an unwilling foot soldier conscripted
daily into war? Casualty fallen anew to the enemy
(as always, as in tragedy, classically mismatched:
bigger, meaner, more cosmically predatory than you),
yes it’s merely nature, neutral as red fox or mink
or short-eared owls that hunt above tufted nest or
burrow. In winter, for short-lived sustenance,
you find, hidden under snow, green parts of plants.
Our lives: mere wingspan of months in the wild;
easy sport, soft, twitching target for the gods.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
watch on YouTube – watch on Vimeo
The Woodrat Podcast returns from summer vacation with its first ever video episode (but don’t worry, this will remain mostly an audio show). I wanted to do a bit of a show-and-tell with some poetry books published as reversible, upside-down or tête-bêche books, including, most recently, Triplicity by Kristen McHenry and Paper Covers Rock by Chella Courington, forthcoming from Indigo Ink Press.
Additional links:
Podcast feed | Subscribe in iTunes
Theme music: “Le grand sequoia,” by Innvivo (Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike licence).
Kung mayroon mang santo, patron,
o diyosa ng bawa’t kalbaryo,
O mga Panginoon, patnubayan ninyo
kaming mga namamalagi sa pisngi
ng lupa: kapirasong guhit ng buwan,
kay layong anino ng haplos.
* * *
Prayer
What saints, patrons
and goddesses might there be for each calvary?
O watch over
us who merely live on the cheek
of this earth: that sliver-stroke of moon,
its distant illusion of a caress.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
watch on Vimeo – watch on YouTube
My first videopoem to use footage from another, equally fun hobby, homebrewing. The poem by D. H. Lawrence is now in the public domain, and I found it rather quickly because my copy of his complete poems is quite throughly annotated with marginalia by its previous owner — my poetry sensei, Jack McManis. Jack had put a big check-mark beside the title and underlined all the best parts, helping me see past its — to my mind — overly didactic framing.
Here’s the text.
Terra Incognita
by D. H. Lawrence
There are vast realms of consciousness still undreamed of
vast ranges of experience, like the humming of unseen harps,
we know nothing of, within us.
Oh when man has escaped from the barbed-wire entanglement
of his own ideas and his own mechanical devices
there is a marvellous rich world of contact and sheer fluid beauty
and fearless face-to-face awareness of now-naked life
and me, and you, and other men and women
and grapes, and ghouls, and ghosts and green moonlight
and ruddy-orange limbs stirring the limbo
of the unknown air, and eyes so soft
softer than the space between the stars,
and all things, and nothing, and being and not-being
alternately palpitant,
when at last we escape the barbed-wire enclosure
of Know Thyself, knowing we can never know,
we can but touch, and wonder, and ponder, and make our effort
and dangle in a last fastidious fine delight
as the fuchsia does, dangling her reckless drop
of purple after so much putting forth
and slow mounting marvel of a little tree.
And here’s the rain again, my love: silvering
the mouths of gargoyles perched at the edge of the roof—
Such watery abundance pouring down, and no other recourse
but sieve and sieve it through. Who could stay aloof
through such constant battering? See how the rushing crowds
clutch their collars close, looking for the nearest roof
under which to shelter. Eventually it lightens; the curtains
shimmer a reprieve. A waterdrop slides down your cheek.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.