A bearable Thanksgiving

Barracuda 3

What’s there to say about a Thanksgiving that was disrupted by a six-and-a-half-hour power outage? Only that, like the Pilgrims at Plymouth, we made the best of it, and filled our bellies in the end.

Margaret's porch 1

Fortunately, we hadn’t planned a large gathering, and so were just able to fit around my sister-in-law’s table in town.

It was a day that began with a fat porcupine squeezing under my front porch — which is something that never looks quite possible even while it’s happening — and ended with a very full toilet bowl that just barely managed to flush. And in between I got to see a black bear cub climbing a tree from only 100 feet away through a tangle of wild grapes. Both of us were too busy stuffing ourselves with grapes to notice the other at first. Then it started to rain, the cub went down the tree, and I closed the distance between us just in time to see the mother’s rear end disappearing into a thicket.

wild grapes

This was the fourth time we’ve had a power outage on Thanksgiving or Christmas, and also the fourth time we’ve seen a bear on a major holiday (the others were on Christmas and Easter). I guess I’m thankful to be living in a place where power outages are still rare enough to be remembered, but even if someday they become a routine occurence, the chances are good that we will still be sharing the mountain with bears and porcupines — and for that I am truly thankful.

Passing water

Clouded Drab

I thought I’d post a fresh picture for once, so here’s one from my jaunt to Greenwich on Friday: someone walking their dogs near some of the C17th sweet chestnut trees.

Giant mossy boles
of ancient chestnuts. A dog
strains at his leash.

*

Burning Silo

There’s a hypnotic quality to wave-watching. I find a safe spot to stand or sit, and then let my mind get in synch with the rhythm of the waves. Among my favourites is to find a place where I can watch the seething, frothy riptide as it churns to wash up and away from the shore. The white caps and foam smash together and frequently rise up to form mountainous crests in the surf.

A wild coast–
white peaks of water rise
between the rocks.

*

Dharma bums

We’ve been distracted by beauty and pain. Stunning sights of sleeping sea otters and stories of rage and murder.

Laid up with pain,
he thinks about the sea otters
sleeping on the waves.

*

Creature of the Shade

The trees themselves aren’t interesting to photograph, but I had a pleasant half hour looking at lavender blossoms on someone’s dark blue car. It yielded a monochrome effect, with reflected accents of both city and tree.

Sky-colored blossoms
on the hood of a sky-colored car
float on their shadows.

*

Two Dishes But to One Table

Rivers in the desert are open for business intermittently. The rest of the time they are tempting trails.

Petroglyphs
at the bend of a dry river:
sinuous lines.

White space

hook-shaped sapling

Snow is a harsh editor, bringing out the most dramatic details and burying the rest. This black gum sapling grows less than ten feet from a trail, but I’d never focused on it before: an antelope in mid-leap, looking back over its shoulder.

sticky

From almost nothing in the depths of the hollow, the snow grew thicker on leaves and branches as I climbed the side of the ridge. A hundred yards beyond the “antelope,” I surprised a doe that had been bedded down under white mounds of mountain laurel. For once, her tail matched the color of the woods, and it was the grayish-brown of her winter coat that flashed alarm.

snow textures
(Best viewed at larger size)

What begins as erasure, a laudable minimalism, becomes positively rococo as every last detail is freighted with a burden of white space.

snow on witch hazel blossoms

Witch-hazel blossoms are capable of self-pollination when cold prevents the late moths, flies, and beetles from visiting. Is it possible that an early snow like this could also do the trick, if it were to soften and slide down a branch just so, from one flower to another? Well, probably not. But I like the idea of snow as a matchmaker, for some reason.

snowy trunks

Going back along the ridgetop, I relished the silence and the fact that, for once, I didn’t break it just by walking: the fallen leaves were as muffled as those still clinging to the trees. From time to time a leaf-sized clump of snow would plummet to the ground, making a leaf-shaped print, like a promissory note.

Poetry for naturalists (4)

Part 1; Part 2; Part 3.

16. Selected Poems 1966-1987, by Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990)

Though Heaney may not be the sort of poet likely to make it onto standard lists of nature-poets, few of his poems are without an almost palpable presence of the land and its inhabitants, both human and wild. This particular volume includes a number of things of likely interest to nature lovers: selections from Death of a Naturalist and Wintering Out; the bog-people poems from North; a generous selection from Field Work; and best of all, five translations from the Medieval Irish cycle Sweeney Astray, about the Ulster king who went mad and was turned into a bird, as well as Heaney’s own “Sweeney Redivivus” cycle from Station Island. Here’s an excerpt from one of the translations (or versions, as Heaney terms them), “Sweeney’s Last Poem”:

There was a time when I preferred
the turtle-dove’s soft jubilation
as it flitted round a pool
to the murmur of conversation.

There was a time when I preferred
the blackbird singing on the hill
and the stag loud against the storm
to the clinking tongue of this bell.

There was a time when I preferred
the mountain grouse crying at dawn
to the voice and closeness
of a beautiful woman.

There was a time when I preferred
wolf-packs yelping and howling
to the sheepish voice of a cleric
bleating out plainsong.

You are welcome to pledge healths
and carouse in your drinking dens;
I will dip and steal water
from a well with my open palm.

Silent reading often gives short shrift to poets like Heaney. I found an online recording of the poet reading a piece from a later collection, The Spirit Level — listen to St. Kevin and the Blackbird.

17. The Book of Medicines, by Linda Hogan (Coffee House Press, 1993)

The bear is a dark continent
that walks upright
like a man,

says Linda Hogan, and of a mountain lion, she observes,

Her power lived
in a dream of my leaving.
It was the same way
I have looked so many times at others
in clear light
before lowering my eyes
and turning away
from what lives inside those
who have found
two worlds cannot live
inside a single vision.

But it’s way too easy to find such quotes in this book of eminently quotable poems, where concern for the health of the land and the health of people — both whites and Hogan’s own Chickasaw — are closely interwoven.

There is still a little life
left inside this body,
a little wildness here
and mercy
and it is the emptiness
we love, touch, enter in one another
and try to fill.
–“Nothing”

Hogan’s is a wise voice that deserves a much wider audience.

18. Wolfwatching, by Ted Hughes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989)

Nobody mythologizes animals quite as effectively as Hughes, I think. I could’ve chosen almost any of his books for this list, but this slim volume edged out the others for its inclusion of the three-part poem, “The Black Rhino.”

This is the Black Rhino, the elastic boulder, coming at a gallop.
The boulder with a molten core, the animal missile,
Enlarging towards you. This is him in his fame —

Whose past is Behemoth, sixty million years printing the strata
Whose present is the brain-blink behind a recoiling gunsight
Whose future is a cheap watch shaken in your ear

Listen — bedrock accompanies him, a drumbeat
But his shadow over the crisp tangle of grass-tips hesitates, passes, hesitates, passes lightly
As a moth at noon

For this is the Black Rhino, who vanishes as he approaches
Every second there is less and less of him
By the time he reaches you nothing will remain, maybe, but the horn — an ornament for a lady’s lap

Extinction, like genocide, makes the imagination seize up, but for that very reason I think it is imperative for any poet of the late 20th or early 21st century to keep trying to put it into words. Hughes succeeded as well as anyone can.

19. The Way Winter Works, by Harry Humes (University of Arkansas Press, 1990)

If Pennsylvania had a poet laureate, Harry Humes would be my choice for the post. His understated-yet-powerful poems are firmly rooted in the hills and valleys of the hard coal country where he grew up and lives still. (So strong is his commitment to understatement that he has never written a poem about Centralia, the famous Pennsylvania town that had to be abandoned because of the slow fire burning underneath it in an abandoned coal mine. “Too obvious,” Humes said when I asked him about it after a poetry reading once. At least five other poets, including W.S. Merwin, haven’t suffered from any such scruples.)

More to the point here, Humes is a competent naturalist and fly fisherman who knows the names and ways of the wild, or what passes for it in the well-used landscapes of central and eastern Pennsylvania. I guess I own all of his books, and I love each one of them; The Way Winter Works simply happens to have the greatest number of personal favorites. “Deer Hunting,” for example, might well be the definitive poem on that subject, though definitiveness was probably the farthest thing from the author’s mind when he wrote it. And the book contains touches of surrealism absent from his other books, as in “The Woman Who Called Whales across the Fields.”

A lot of Humes’ poems are about memory; I hope he won’t mind if I quote one of the shorter ones in its entirety.

Sorrow near the Old House

I walk to the place in the woods
where an old foundation fills
with one season after another
and sit on the stones
to watch for copperheads and deer,
then walk along the stream to the inlet.

All of it the same.
Bats beginning their dance,
oars creaking on the lake,
the overgrown path through the meadow
with its yarrow and pearly everlasting,
the way I imagine the house,
yellow with light, watertight with children.

20. Imperfect Thirst, by Galway Kinnell (Houghton Mifflin, 1994)

This may not be the most obvious choice of a book by Kinnell to demonstrate his closeness to nature, but it is dear to me for the inclusion of a poem called “Holy Shit,” which begins with a ridiculous shit-load of epigraphs, continues with a three-page consideration of various kinds of human and animal excrement, and ends with this injunction:

Let us remember this is our home
and that we have become, we mad ones, its keepers.
Let us sit bent forward slightly, and be opened a moment,
as earth’s holy matter passes through us.

Rereading another poem, “Trees,” just now, and hearkening back to the discussion in Part 1 of this series about when and whether poets should use the proper names for things, I was struck by Kinnell’s decision to describe rather than name a woodpecker and a nuthatch:

Tok-tok-tok-tok, as from somebody
nailing upholstery, started up nearby:
the bird with a bloodmark on the back
of his head clung, cutting with
steady strokes his cave of wormwood.
On another tree, a smaller bird,
in gray rags, put her rump
to the sky and walked headfirst
down the trunk toward the earth
and the earth under the earth.

Since the poem is describing an incident from childhood, I think we are meant to understand that the narrator didn’t know the names of these birds. But think how much less wonder would’ve been communicated in these descriptions if the names had been included! By contrast, a poem called “Collusion of Elements” takes the opposite tack, in its first two lines referring to familiar garden flowers by their less familiar, full Latin names. In either case, the poet aims to strangefy, I guess:

On the riverbank Narcissus poeticus holds an ear trumpet toward the canoe apparitioning past.
Cosmos sulphureous flings back all its eyelashes and stares.

In my favorite poem in the book, “Telephoning in Mexican Sunlight,” the narrator is at a pay phone in Mexico, talking with his “beloved in New York,” when a dozen small hummingbirds start orbiting his head, attracted by the lurid color of his shirt. Rereading it, I’m thinking I like it better even than Diane Ackerman’s hummingbird poem now (see Part 2), though that of course says more about my preference for economy and punchy endings than anything else. An excerpt really wouldn’t do it justice, but fortunately the whole poem is archived at the Boston Review. Notice how here, too, an unnamed word focuses attention, and how we are permitted to guess it through the circumspect ruse of three flower names offered in its stead.

Windshield frost

frizzyLogic

We crawled cautiously, semi-sighted, across junctions and around corners until, on the slope by the park, we turned head on toward the sun. That first lick of low light was enough to temper the ice which now slid softly sideways under the rhythm of the blades.

The first touch of sun
and the windshield frost is gone —
so clear a view!

*

Light Verse for a Heavy Universe

Most of the numbers in the world are wrong and always have been. Government agencies ceaselessly and shamelessly revise their figures. Scientists and engineers “refine” theirs. Economists “massage” their data and finally turn the charts upside-down or sideways to make the numbers match reality.

Counting to 10 can help prevent a row —
is having a number better than having a cow?
Our days are numbered, we think, but we don’t know how.
Clocks make us forget that every moment is now.

*

Twitter [note on login page, 11/16]

You’ll be able to access Twitter again in just a second. We’re just shuffling a few things around. Just hang tight… [emphasis added]

Just
an adjustment, but so un-
just!

*

One Word

I didn’t write today. I cleaned.

Last week sucked mightily.

I have the next three days off.

This is not a poem. This is how my brain is working now.

I want D to be happy. I want Moby to be happy.

Moby is easier. He got to lie in the sun on a curl of red wool today.

This is not a poem.
This is how my brain is working now.
I want D to be happy.

*

bird by bird

Here’s the Cordelia resident snowy egret, which perches on pens and pools and knows how to get free food…

At feeding time
for the de-oiled waterfowl,
a snowy egret.

*

Watermark

I am twenty, walking home from work in Billings. A man in a car calls me over to ask directions. When I get to the car, I see that he is exposed, masturbating. I turn away, thinking this did not happen. I hear the words: this did not happen. I even see the words pass by my eyes, like the ticker on the bottom of the CNN screen (cable news, which hasn’t yet been invented): THIS … DID … NOT … HAPPEN.

Penis in hand,
he calls a woman over
to ask directions.

*

box elder

…and, of course, button-eyed frogs. I say of course, because, in truth, my sister is a frog phobic (and I will leave it to you to find out the correct Greek-rooted word for that), and as so often happens with phobias, the object has become something of a motif in her life and work!

Buttons for eyes
on the bestiary quilt —
you’ll find them at night.

*

{ Never Neutral }

I spend long hours staring at the computer. Autism redefined. Suddenly, an eyelid starts to twitch, then the biceps, or the triceps sometimes, starts to pulse, like a heart, like a rabbit inside a magician’s hat, like saying, take me out of here, “remember me”. The ghost is not in the machine, but in the body enslaved by the machine.

There on the glass
when the monitor goes dark,
my own sad face.

Poetry for naturalists (3)

Part 1; Part 2.

11. Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1992, by Hayden Carruth (Copper Canyon Press, 1992)

Then it came to me,
this insane song, wavering music
like the cry of the genie inside his lamp,
it came from inside the long wilderness
of my life, a loon’s song, and there he was
swimming on the pond, guarding
his mate’s nest by the shore,
diving and staying under
unbelievable minutes and coming up
where no one was looking. My friend
told how once in his boyhood
he had seen a loon swimming beneath his boat,
a shape dark and powerful
down in that silent mysterious world, and how
it had ejected a plume of white excrement
curving behind. “It was beautiful,”
he said.
–“The Loon on Forrester’s Pond”

Earthy, often plain-spoken, rooted in the landscapes of New England and upstate New York: this excerpt encapsulates the major features of Hayden Carruth’s work as well as any could. His prominence as an editor (Poetry magazine, Harper’s, the anthology The Voice That Is Great Within Us) may have led some critics to overlook the fact that he’s a damn fine poet in his own right — a master of language and a virtuoso of poetic form. And imagery from the natural world is no occasional ornament, but an almost constant presence in his work.

12. Some Heaven, by Todd Davis (Michigan State University Press, 2007)

The second book of a poet with roots in Indiana and western Massachusetts, recently relocated to Central Pennsylvania. I’ve written about (and quoted from) this book before, after attending a reading by the author. Like Wendell Berry, Davis often mixes religious themes and subjects into his poems about nature and landscape. Here, for example, is the first half of the title poem:

The rabbit’s head is caught
between the slats of the fence,
and in its struggle it has turned
so the hind legs nearly touch
the nose — neck broken, lungs failing.
My boys ask me to do something
but see no mercy in my plan.
At five and eight, they are so far
away from their own deaths
that they cannot imagine the blessing
a shovel might hold, the lesson
suffering offers those who have
not suffered.

13. The Wild Iris, by Louise Glück (Ecco Press, 1992)

This book is, for my money, one of the greatest poetic achievements in English of the last thirty years: a modern book of hours from a fallen Eden in which the poet addresses a God in whom she does not believe — and God and the plants in her garden talk back. You don’t have to know anything about plants to appreciate the genius of the arrangement or the vatic intensity of the monologues, but it probably helps. Here’s the latter part of “The Red Poppy”:

I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
What could such glory be
if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters,
were you like me once, long ago,
before you were human? Did you
permit yourselves
to open once, who would never
open again? Because in truth
I am speaking now
the way you do. I speak
because I am shattered.

14. The Owl in the Mask of the Dreamer: Collected Poems, by John Haines (Graywolf Press, 1993)

Another one of my favorite books, which I’ve quoted from more than once before. A blurb on the back of my edition puts it well: “Splendidly odd, somberly beautiful. … John Haines’s spare, oracular lyrics feel as if they have come from a great distance” — from Alaska, to be precise. Haines writes about wilderness and the experience of living in it without a false note or trace of sentimentality. Picking one excerpt is challenging for me, but since I began this series by talking about the difficulty poets sometimes have in using the specific names of organisms, how about a poem which depends on such names for its effect? Here are the opening stanzas of “Mushroom Fable”; the capitalized phrases are names of fungi:

I knew them all in that age of saliva.

Soapy Tricholoma I knew,
and Blackening Russula.
I called Oak-loving Collybia
my friend, I gave her
Pig’s Ears and Witches Butter.

Born a Smoky Woodlover, I scored
with Chicken-in-the-Woods,
and cast my spawn in a Fairy Ring.
I wanted Dark-Centered Hebeloma
once, but never found her.

But I turned my back on those
tragic sisters, the False Morels;
I pitied the pale Amanitas
their bitter names
and bad complexions,
for they were beneath me.

15. The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems, by Jim Harrison (Copper Canyon Press, 1998)

It is very hard to give birds advice.
They are already members of eternity.
In their genes they have both compass
and calendar. Their wing bones are hollow.
We are surprised by how light a dead bird is.

[…]

Offenses this summer against Nature:
poured iced tea on a garter snake’s head
as he or she dozed on the elm stump,
pissed on a bumblebee (inattentive),
kicked a thousand wasps to death in my slippers.
Favors done this summer for Nature:
let the mice keep their nest in the green station wagon …

That’s from the long poem “Returning to Earth,” one of many varied treasures in this volume, which also includes 65 ghazals, the 30-part Letters to Yesenin, and an eccentric collection of 57 American Zen poems named for the equally eccentric Japanese Zen master and poet — After Ikkyí» & Other Poems. A native of Michigan dubbed “the poet laureate of appetite” by Salon magazine, Harrison is gaining fame for his fiction and nonfiction, but poetry seems his truest calling. His poems are as warm and full of humor as Haines’ are stark and grave; a fondness for nature and natural imagery is really the only thing these two, radically different poets share.

Continue to Part 4.

Junk shop

oak leaf under chestnut bark

Not all falling leaves go to the same place. Trapped under the peeling skin of a dead chestnut, the oak leaf fades from blood red to bloodstain brown,

maple leaf under oak bark

while an orange and scarlet maple leaf peeks like an insurrectionary flag from a crevasse next to a bulge of scar tissue on an ancient oak.

chestnut oak leaves

The November woods are a little like a junk shop, full of discarded treasures.

Be sure to send your tree-related links to Larry Ayers — larry (dot) ayers (at) gmail (dot) com — by November 29 for the next Festival of the Trees, this time at Riverside Rambles.

*

chatoyance

[photo]

Outside a junk shop,
a quilt, the bars of a gate —
wandering shadows.

*

the cassandra pages

Behind the plate glass, behind the empty outside baskets and washed blackboard, tomatoes shine in red pyramids and leeks stand at attention like sailors. White mattresses in dormitory rows already sleep under all-night lights while men in black suits discuss the day’s receipts. Outside the Intermarché the man with the tattooed face eats something rapidly, seated on his blanket […]

Empty sandwich board.
The man with the tattooed face
wolfs down his supper.

*

Somewhere in NJ

I don’t think I could ever tire of watching sanderlings and was glad to see such a large group huddled together against the wind. Have you ever seen sanderlings hop on one foot before the surf, rather than running like they normally do? Funny – that sight was my delight this morning!

A windy beach.
Sanderlings hop on one foot
when the surf comes in.

Poetry for naturalists (2)

In Part 1 of this series, I listed four anthologies. I didn’t include any anthologies specifically of nature poetry, because I have yet to find one that’s fully satisfying — and in any case, I prefer reading single-author collections, which I’ll list alphabetically by author. Please note that this is a purely personal list, heavily influenced by serendipity. I have somewhere around 1000 books of poetry, most of them acquired by chance at sales and used bookstores. I apologize in advance to my British readers for the scarcity of British poets, for example. Books by American poets are simply a lot easier to get a hold of over here.

5. Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems, by Diane Ackerman (Vintage Books, 1991)

Ackerman’s talent for lyric verse is enormous, her knowledge about natural history extensive, and poems about non-human subjects make up the bulk of her work. Her language makes me think of a cross between Plath and Oliver, but that might not adequately convey the lushness of some of these poems. They are best savored two or three at a time, like anything rich. And the geographic scope is enormous, with a poems set everywhere from Amazonia to the Antarctic to the Bronx.

So, in the dark night of the hummingbird,
while lilies lather sweetly in the rain,
the hummingbird rests near collapse,
its quick breath halved, its rugged breath shallow,
its W-shaped tongue, as bright as Cassiopeia,
now mumbling words like wistful and wan.
The world at once drug, anthem, bright lagoon,
where its heart knew all the Morse codes
for rapture, pales into a senseless twilight.
–“The Dark Night of the Hummingbird”

6. Uplands: New Poems, by A. R. Ammons (Norton, 1970)

It took me a long time to discover that I liked Ammons’ unique style, where a love of word-music is matched by a passion for understatement. Now I wish I owned more than just this one, slim volume, in which so many poems betray a deep knowledge of the natural world. He writes about “Runoff,” for example,

quiet and clear,
never tipping enough to break sound,
slowed into marshy landrise and burst

into a bog of lupine and mirrored:
that was a place! what a place!
the soggy small marsh, nutgrass and swordweed!

And in the last two stanzas of the almost-title poem, “Upland,” Ammons deftly captures a geographic feature I’m intimately familiar with:

take the Alleghenies for example,
some quality in the air
of summit stones lying free and loose
out among the shrub trees: every

exigency seems prepared for that might
roll, bound, or give flight
to stone: that is, the stones are
pepared: they are round and ready.

7. Eyes to See Otherwise / Ojos de otro mirar: Selected Poems, by Homero Aridjis, edited by Betty Ferber and George McWhirter (New Directions, 2001)

The editors have gathered the work of multiple translators for this bilingual selection from one of Mexico’s best-known poets, who is also probably its most prominent environmental activist. Homero Aridjis grew up in the closest town to the over-wintering site of the eastern population of monarch butterflies, in Michoacán, and witnessed the destuction caused by careless logging. He went on to form the Group of 100, an association of literary and artistic intellectuals trying to draw public attention to environmental issues. (Wild nature might not have quite as large a constituency in Mexcio as it does here, but intellectuals are held in considerably higher esteem!)

Aridjis’ poetry mines historical as well as natural subjects, finding abundant tragedy and wisdom in both, as in a poem recounting the 16th-century friar Bernadino de Sahagun’s description of the birds of New Spain, or in a prose poem sequence re-envisioning the Aztec New Fire ceremony. Here’s a short poem in its entirety, spoken by some distant descendent of Jonah. I’ll substitute my own translation for the one provided.

Ballena Gris

Ballena gris,
cuando no quede de tí­ más que la imagen
de un cuerpo oscuro que iba por las aguas
del paraí­so de los animales;
cuando no haya memoria de tu paso
ni leyenda que registre tu vida,
porque no hay mar donde quepa tu muerte,
quiero poner sobre tu tumba de agua
estas cuantas palabras:

‘Ballena gris,
danos la dirrección de otro destino.’

Gray Whale

Gray whale,
when nothing is left of you but the image
of a dark body moving through the waters
of the paradise of animals,
when there is no longer any memory of your passing
nor legend to register your ever having lived,
because there is no sea that can accomodate your death,
I want to place on your watery mausoleum
these words:

Gray whale,
show us the way to another fate.

8. The Monkey’s Straw Raincoat and Other Poetry of the Basho School, introduced and translated by Earl Miner and Hiroko Odagiri (Princeton University Press, 1981)

This is really an anthology, an exception to my single-author rule here, but it’s indispensible for anyone interested in the poetry of Matsuo Bashí´ as he himself chose to present it: in multi-author haikai no renga sequences, poetic essays, and collections of hokku arranged by season. The translations are readable, and are accompanied by transcriptions of the originals and detailed notes on facing pages, which are especially useful in letting us see what sort of considerations guided the composition of a linked-verse sequence. Miner and Odagiri made the wise decision to repeat each component verse twice, so we can hear and see it as part of a tanka, and sometimes vary the translation to reflect the shifting sense. Here, for example, is how they present the first five verses of a 36-verse sequence called “Even the Kite’s Feathers.” The authors are Kyorai, Bashí´, Bonchí´, Fumikuni, and Bashí´ again.

    Even the kite’s feathers
have been tidied by the passing shower
    of early winter rain

    Even the kite’s feathers
have been tidied by the passing shower
    of early winter rain
stirred by a single puff of wind
the withered leaves grow still again

Stirred by a single puff of wind
the withered leaves grow still again
    from morning onward
his trousers have been wetted
    in crossing streams

    From morning onward
his trousers have been wetted
    in crossing streams
and he sees the bamboo bow
set to frighten badgers off

Not far from the bamboo bow
set to frighten badgers off
    and through lush ivy
crawling over the lattice door
    comes evening moonlight

9. A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997, by Wendell Berry (Counterpoint, 1998)

I remember not thinking too highly of Berry when I was in my late teens and twenties, but either he changed, or I did. This book is unified both by theme and method of composition: each poem describes a walk he took on a Sunday morning in lieu of going to church, in poems that might be considered prayerful, but never preachy. Here’s how Sabbath IV from 1985 begins:

The fume and shock and uproar
of the internal combustion of America
recede, the last vacationers gone
back to the life that drives away from home.

Bottles and wrappers of expensive
cheap feasts ride the quieted current
toward the Gulf of Mexico.

And now the breeze comes down
from the hill, the kingfisher returns
to the dead limb of the sycamore,
the swallows feed in the air
over the water.

10. BioGraffiti: A Natural Selection, by John M. Burns (Norton, 1975)

As the title and subtitle suggest, this book is the naturalist’s equivalent of “Car Talk,” full of puns and other jokes only a nature nerd could love — or even understand. The introduction by Stephen Jay Gould explains how Burns, his lepidopterist colleague, used to read his light verse at every Wednesday luncheon and Natural History Seminar at Harvard. And if I hadn’t read this book and known of the connection, I wouldn’t have been able to decode the ending of one of Gould’s later essays. He was taking a former colleague and erstwhile supporter to task for his attacks on Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium, and his last paragraph builds up to an apparently innocent repetition of the Delphic maxim, “Know thyself.” However, it’s also the complete text of the shortest, and hence most memorable, poem in Burns’ book — a poem which I suspect would’ve been well known to the target of Gould’s essay. It’s accompanied by an engraving of a snail:

To a Lonely Hermaphrodite

Know
Thyself.

A poem about fern reproduction is entitled, “One Good Fern Deserves Another.” The second stanza adequately conveys the flavor of the book:

Up springs the frondly sporophyte,
        with rhizome, root, and rachis
And a meristem that’s apical and tight.
It uncoils; but on a leaf that is preparing for meiosis
Sporangia in clusters make a very sori sight.

Continue to Part 3.

Like Kyogen’s stone

small change

She made her way down the steps and as she took her first step on the path, conk, she felt something hitting her head fast and hard. Just about where her right frontal lobe area might be residing, a big nut from a tree (which she can’t identify botanically just now), knocked, as if trying to remind her of the sense of the day she spent.

Like Kyogen’s stone,
that falling nut made contact
with something pliable.

*

feathers of hope

Went back to Cordelia this afternoon. I saw people looking in pools as I arrived. I went up and there, in the first pool I got to, were about twenty surf scoters. Swimming. Clean, washed, waterproof, and swimming. I sketched one quickly. Have you seen the grebes, I was asked.

Free of oil,
the surf scoters swim in circles
around the pool.

*

The Middlewesterner

The red tail hawk just north of Fairwater is the color of absence today. Everything changes in the somberness.

Hawk in the rain
darkens to match her perch
above the highway.

*

Roundrock Journal

The stump has rotted away. Only the part protected by the mailbox is still there, and I won’t be surprised when we find the box on the ground beside a spongy stump.

Birdhouse on a tree,
mailbox on a rotting stump:
a lonely campsite.

*

Hoarded Ordinaries

Yes, the bear’s mouth is wide open in the front, and that’s where your face sticks out. So it kind of looks like you’ve been swallowed by the bear & are looking out of its mouth, I guess.

The hockey fan’s face
half-swallowed by a foam bear,
roaring drunk.

*

Rurality

[photo]

The cut stem hardens,
taking a firmer grip
on the big pumpkin.

*

box elder

Then it seemed as though everyone in the northern hemisphere was photographing misty morning spiders’ webs, which was no reason not to do it myself, but I didn’t get around to it anyway. Now I’m wondering about blogging out of season, as it were, when the moment has passed, posting things after their ‘sell by’ date… I’m not sure.

The month-old photos
of dew on spiderwebs —
cobwebby now.

*

Eye in a bell

..waar komen ze vandaan? Reflecties van de ramen, of van de letters op de paarse vlag? Zijn ze een teken? Moet ik een staatslot kopen eindigend op 8? De 8ste trede van de trap overslaan als ik morgenochtend het perron opren?

Reflected light:
mysterious numeral 8s
on a shaded street.

Poetry for naturalists (1)

Back on August 3, Chris Clarke wrote A paean to Charles Simic to note his getting a new job. It began:

I’ve read some of your poems.
You seem to notice birds a lot.
They show up in a lot of your poems
but you don’t say what kind of birds they are.
Are they warblers? Owls?
Robins, or big brooding hawks?
Whooping cranes? You don’t tell us.

And when the birds sit in a tree or shrub
you don’t tell us what kind of tree or shrub. It’s OK.
Not everyone is curious about that kind of thing,
and even if you told us it was a nightingale
and that it was on a Liquidambar branch
most of us wouldn’t know what either of those was.

I’m a huge fan of Charles Simic, especially of his earlier books, so I kind of bristled at the post. It seems unfair to single out Simic for something that so many poets are guilty of. On the other hand, Chris does address something I’ve thought about a lot in reference to my own work: how specific can we get in talking about nature without losing half our audience, which neither knows nor cares about such details?

It’s been interesting to read the submissions that have come into qarrtsiluni over the last twelve days. “Insecta” is the first theme we’ve had where carelessness about natural history can get otherwise stellar submissions rejected. Marly and Ivy made it clear in their call for submissions that they welcomed all manner of literary and artistic creations, including those that are merely inspired by insects; a poem doesn’t have to be what Chris Clarke might consider a nature poem in order to pass muster. But it can’t be about spiders! I really don’t think it’s too much to ask that a literate person at least be able to distinguish an insect from an arachnid.

I’d go further and suggest that it’s not too much to ask anyone who calls him- or herself a poet to take a strong interest in learning the English names of most of the common, macroscopic species that call their bioregion home, in the same way s/he should have a working knowledge of Greek mythology and the Bible. It’s basic knowledge that can only enrich one’s appreciation for the world. And poets are all about vocabulary, right? It doesn’t have to make it into your work, but for Christ’s sake, at least give a shit!

Simic, on the other hand, is unapologetically anthropocentric: “Human beings and what happen to them are much more of a presence in my poems than, let’s say, nature,” he told an interviewer in 1977. He went on:

The problem with the so-called nature poems is that they generate all that false, easy pantheism and mysticism. Sure, we have such experiences, but they are really rare. I distrust poets who have a mystical experience each time they look at a tree or a falling leaf. It just doesn’t happen. It’s a kind of fakery. I’m all for nature and all the good, wholesome thoughts it produces in human beings, but in moderation. I mean it’s harder to deal with a city and that totally fucked up world of super highways, slums, subways, and the poor bastards who have to go to work every day in that world. Religious emotions about nature are easy; this other thing — that’s very difficult. That’s why I always respected David Ignatow, who has written so many incredible portraits of poor unfortunates who make their living in this monstrous world. I see a kind of integrity there. We are surrounded by piles and piles of shit, and it’s not something we can dismiss. It’s where we live. You’ve got to look at it and do something about it.

That’s from Simic’s The Uncertain Certainty: Interviews, Essays, and Notes on Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 1985).

Again, as with Chris’ “Paean,” there are points here I do agree with, depending on what kind of “nature poems” we are talking about. However, his insistence that poets should be primarily concerned with the plight of modern, industrial humanity is eerily similar to the official position on poetry in most 20th-century communist regimes, inluding the one Simic and his family fled in Yugoslavia. To me, all good poetry is nature poetry; I’m not in the habit of sorting either the poems I read or the poems I write by subject matter. Some poets who treat nature as an ideological touchstone or an excuse for pseudo-mystical rambling do leave me cold, as do poets who — like many of the supposedly great English poets of the 18th century and before — rarely admit an unconventional natural image into their work, to say nothing of a named species. I agree that it’s difficult to write convincing poems about non-human subjects, having failed so many times in that regard myself. But it’s also rare that I write anything about plants or animals without at least alluding to “this monstrous world” in which we all, rural and urban alike, are complicit in. And of all the poets I admire who write with integrity about the natural world, I can’t think of any who “dismiss” the concerns of humanity, as Simic implies.

In fact, there are a lot of poets on my bookshelf who manage to write about non-human subjects without descending into “false, easy pantheism and mysticism” — and who don’t mind calling a species by its proper name on occasion. With these two guidelines in mind, I spent an enjoyable couple of hours this morning gathering a tall stack of books, and I thought it might be worthwhile if I wrote a little bit about each one, and/or found a good quote to share. Tomorrow I’ll begin a list of single-author books of poetry for nature-lovers, but first — speaking of pantheism — here are a few anthologies of poetry in which close attention to the natural world is a conspicuous feature.

1. The Honey Tree Song: Poems and Chants of the Sarawak Dayaks, by Carol Rubenstein
(Ohio University Press, 1985)

Oral poetry of an agrarian or hunting-gathering people is often replete with natural imagery, and these poems are no exception. Rubenstein is a poet as well as an anthropologist, and she did a phenomenal amount of work gathering and translating oral poetry from seven distinct societies during a three-year residency in Borneo back in the 1970s; this is a lengthy work. In the introduction, she describes in some detail the procedures she used for trying to determine the exact meanings of words and allusions when the dialect changed every five miles and she had to work with a shifting cast of translators into Malay and English.

Here are a few lines from the title poem:

The rhinoceros beetle — the heavy gurgling sound.
The cricket — the high insisting sound.
The rhinoceros beetle says this comes first,
the cricket says that should be first —
the words of the honey tree song.
The seeds that come from the land near the sea
are big as that in the beak of the little kunchih bird. …
Honey tree found by my grandfather when he was lost in the jungle,
found by my grandmother when she was hunting with a blowpipe,
found by my father when he was out walking.
Planted by a tiny short-tailed porcupine and his wife,
planted by a big long-quilled porcupine and his wife,
planted by a pheasant on the edge of the jungle,
planted by a moonrat on the edge of the hill,
planted on the edge of the junction of two rivers,
planted between two ponds.

2. I Breathe a New Song: Poems of the Eskimo, edited by Richard Lewis (Simon and Schuster, 1971)

From Dayaks to kayaks! If Rubenstein’s work is a little too scholarly, this might be a little too popular in its presentation: the lack of notes identifying the exact source for each poem in the anthropological literature bothers me. Other than that, it’s a fine selection. The poems are arranged thematically, with the cultural/geographic provenance given at the end of each. Here’s one that demonstrates a good, earthy sense of humor (I take it that “turned its back” really means, “went bottoms-up,” i.e. mooned):

Then said the blowfly:
“Because you are bellyless — perhaps
You cannot reply at all!”
The little water beetle then said:
“Devoid of belly — maybe so!
Still, you may be sure that I will answer back!”
And with a grimace
It turned its back at once
Without making any attempt to answer back.
He was a bad one for arguing.
(Netsilik)

3. Singing for Power: The Song Magic of the Papago Indians of Southern Arizona, by Ruth Murray Underhill (University of California Press, 1938)

Despite the extreme simplicity of their material culture, the Tohono O’odham, as they now prefer to be called, have an extraordinarily rich oral literature. It’s been well documented but unfortunately rather poorly translated, with a few exceptions, and this popularly written study is one of them. As in many oral cultures, the O’odham had several different levels of performative speech, at least two of which might translate as “poetry,” and Underhill includes examples of both genres, along with just enough description at the beginning of each chapter to set the stage, describing the social circumstances from which the poems arose. My only criticism is that her selections are a bit on the short side, considering the length of the sequences from which they were drawn. The reader gets the mistaken impression that the O’odham specialized in verses of haiku or tanka length, where in fact they favored linked-verse sequences capable of continuing all night.

Quail children under the bushes
Were chattering.
Our comrade Coyote heard them.
Softly he came padding up
And stood wriggling his ears
In all directions.

4. Yoruba Poetry: An Anthology of Traditional Poems, by Ulli Beier (Cambridge University Press, 1970)

This is the only book here I don’t own; I’ve only read the copy in the Penn State library, and don’t have it with me to quote from. As with the other books I’ve just listed, I can’t comment on the accuracy of the translations, only on their effectiveness in English, and in that respect they are superb. Yoruba poetry is full of concrete images, many derived from the natural world. Fortunately, some of the poems are included in a book I do own: The Penguin Book of Oral Poetry, by Ruth Finnegan — which by the way is a great anthology, flawed only by the author’s failure to include any African epics (which she mistakenly believed did not exist). Anyway, here’s one of Beier’s translations from Finnegan’s Yoruba section:

Leopard

Gentle hunter
His tail plays on the ground
While he crushes the skull.

Beautiful death
Who puts on a spotted robe
When he goes to his victim.

Playful killer
Whose loving embrace
Splits the antelope’s heart.

Continue to Part 2.