It’s like walking in the dark
or chewing on a good-luck tooth:
a map doesn’t always help
& no vowel can be trusted.
Which is why the Israelites
dispensed with both. But
we have lived here in Canaan
so long, we’ve forgotten
about ties & collars
& all the other uses to which
a neck can be put. Jubilee
comes every day at noon, now,
& the Adam’s apple never falls
far before bouncing back.
Goats can get by, I swear,
on the notes no one else sings.
It’s like the glass ball
in an antique lightning rod—
its highest aspiration is
to break free. The night itself
doesn’t need more than
a few hardy katydids
to throb. Who are we
that we should fret
over bars of brass?
Try
Try to tell the caterpillar that the white
marble column is not a tree.
Try to make the bee stop battering
the same spot on the window.
Try to ask the swamp to stop smoldering
after being struck by lightning.
Try to tell the blind man that a sheet
of leather hides no windows.
Try to tell the woman changing her husband’s
dressings he might not see this year’s first snow.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Ghazal of Unattainable Silence
A pair of goldfinches in the tall bull
thistle— only the female eats in silence.
Some people, entering a room, automatically turn on
the radio, the tv: almost as if afraid of silence.
I wish I had a porch or balcony where I could sit
until the noise of traffic dials down to silence.
Thrice now we’ve sighted a young night heron— clatter
of the dustbin lid behind the fence, then silence.
My friend texts me about the moon on his drive home:
I imagine the ribbon of coast, water liquid as silence.
Too many times like passing ships, at both ends of missed
opportunities. Why can’t we touch at the center, in silence?
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Patience, young grasshopper: a beginner’s insights into attention
Master Po: Close your eyes. What do you hear?
Young Caine: I hear the water, I hear the birds.
Po: Do you hear your own heartbeat?
Caine: No.
Po: Do you hear the grasshopper which is at your feet?
Caine: Old man, how is it that you hear these things?
Po: Young man, how is it that you do not?
“Kung Fu” (TV series), pilot episode, 1972
A grasshopper doesn’t move when I pass her on the concrete walk through the front garden to my door. This seems unusual, and I crouch down for a closer look. I think the bright red hind legs might make it red-legged grasshopper, Melanoplus femurrubrum, but it’s probably something in that genus, at any rate. I notice the end of the abdomen is swelling and contracting, and keeps pressing against the concrete like a finger probing for a weak spot. She takes a few steps forward, presses the concrete some more, then steps off the walk into the garden and immediately finds a patch of bare dirt that behaves as expected, yielding to pressure. The swelling and contracting of the abdomen, combined with steady pressure from the big hind legs, slowly forces it into the soil to the depth of about a centimeter. The grasshopper now remains immobile for the next several minutes except for a slight throbbing of the abdomen, which I presume denotes the deposition of eggs.
The more this grasshopper absorbs my attention, the more I notice of her surroundings, too: the small black ant walking in tight circles beside her, a larger red ant that crosses the walk in a more purposeful manner, the black field cricket — half the length of the grasshopper but just as fat, and twice as charismatic — who comes down the walk toward me and crosses into the moss garden. I hear a hummingbird buzzing into the spicebush above my head, then dropping down almost to my ear and hovering for a second before rising into the lilac and briefly perching. Even as I watch, others are watching me.
When the grasshopper pulls out, she climbs back up onto the sidewalk, which has evidently lost none of its attractiveness. She crosses it slowly, again “fingering” it with the end of her abdomen every inch of the way. How can any creature be so unaware as to mistake hard concrete for soil, just because it’s a similar color? Finally she stumbles off the other side of the walk and onto another suitable patch of dirt where the moss hasn’t grown in yet. Since our last rain was just two days ago, again she has no trouble penetrating the soil surface with her throbbing organ. I stand up slowly from my crouch, but clearly she is too intent on egg-laying to notice me and the threat to her existence I represent.
A nascent online community devoted to “practicing the art of attention,” This Life Lived, challenges members this week to consider the nature of attention itself:
What does “attention” mean to you? How do you define attention for yourself? What do you look like when you are paying attention, and what are you doing? What do you feel when you are at full attention: Do you feel calm and still, or do you feel wired and energized?
Try to construct a clear and personal definition of attention this week. If you struggle to get started, you could say to yourself or write in your journal, “To me, attention means that I am ______________ .” Then describe that definition in detail. Take time with your personal definition. Notice yourself throughout the coming week, and try to catch yourself in the act of paying attention. Notice what that act or moment does for you, and how it affects your day.
To me, attention means that I am going out of myself, not unlike the egg-laying grasshopper — and in the process, making myself vulnerable. Somehow, I think, the vulnerability is key to the whole experience. Although I am fortunate to live on a mountain with (at present) no man-eating carnivores or poisonous snakes, crouching down in the woods or fields at various times of the year can definitely be hazardous, exposing one to Lyme disease-carrying deer ticks. I don’t spend a whole lot of time obsessing about that, but the point is that the vulnerability of a rapt observer is real and not theoretical. Women and girls of course experience another whole dimension of vulnerability in many seemingly remote areas. In any case, my point is that we are the products of millions of years of evolution in which we were usually prey animals as well as hunters and foragers, and I think the kinds of attention we experience today have been shaped by all three of those roles (among others). I’d go so far as to suggest that the way the attention rather quickly widens out when we focus on one thing is an adaptive behavior. We may be focusing on what’s right in front of us — some hard-to-spot wild root crop, say — but if a twig snaps the wrong way, we’ll hear it.
When I sit out on the porch drinking my coffee in the morning, much of the time I am not paying attention. But at a certain point I’ll remember that I need some interesting observation to write about for The Morning Porch, and at that point I turn into a kind of hunter-gatherer. I don’t have a clear search-image in mind, but I’m alert for anything that will make good writing fodder. Often I begin by listening, mentally naming everything I hear, which at this time of year may not be much: goldfinch chittering, the steady trill of tree crickets, the whine of an annual cicada, a passing jet, the faint sounds of traffic from the gap. Just listening like this makes me more aware of what I’m seeing, too, and it’s a good way to begin because listening is inherently more absorptive than looking, which preserves a distance between observer and observed. Sometimes then I’ll stand up and start taking a mental inventory of the plants in my front yard.
It’s funny: as I’ve probably mentioned here before, when I was a kid I was very resistant to the idea of learning names for wild things, because it seemed to me that once we associate something with a fixed name, we make it much more difficult to see that thing in a different light. Now that I’m a writer, though, I’ve bowed to necessity and put a high priority on learning the common names. It’s true, you can have some sort of relationship with something for years without knowing what it’s called. Perhaps someone more enlightened than me can experience something akin to the Zen ideal of direct seeing — good luck with that. In my experience, knowing a name is the first step toward making something’s acquaintance in a real way.
As many thousands of times as I walked up the road as a kid, coming home from school, I never knew the names of the plants whose hard, comma-shaped seeds could so easily be stripped from the stalk, or the ones with fleshy, translucent stems that snapped so easily. They were my companions in dawdling; I de-seeded and uprooted them unmercifully as an occupation for my distracted fingers. Was I really paying attention to those unnamed plants? Not really. It was only about ten years ago, on a hike sponsored by our local Audubon chapter, that I finally learned what people call them: jumpseed (Polygonum virginianum) and clearweed (Pilea pumila), a stingless nettle. These names were so right, and so delightful, I was immediately ashamed of my long-standing callousness, and I haven’t been able to see either plant since without an inward smile of recognition.
If you’re a poet, you’re probably familiar with some version of that relaxed-yet-focused, semi-trance state in which the best lines and ideas come to the surface. I’m sure other artists get into that zone as well. For me, its strongest analogy is to hypnagogia (thanks for the word, Natalie!): it is a mild kind of threshold consciousness characterized by increased receptivity and suggestibility. As with actual hypnagogia, it’s a state that often yields real insights. But it’s not so different, either, from that state of attention I found myself in this morning, watching the grasshopper probe the ground with her ovipositor, or earlier, on the porch, listening to goldfinches and watching them glean seeds from the wild thistle. I was open, I was vulnerable, I was letting things in.
Late Summer Landscape, with Twilight and Daughters
Tonight, one of the older daughters comes to dinner and also to cry on my shoulder. The other one, sick with nausea, headaches, and cold sweats, takes her sister’s hands in her own too across the kitchen table. And then they bend their heads upon the braided place mats and sit like that a while, not saying much, but feeling. I’d always thought when I turned fifty I’d feel not older, not wearier, but wiser. But here I am, porous clay madonna watching this tableau, while outside, in late summer twilight, the air is clear and the sun buffs the edges of foliage at a low angle. If you look closely you might be astonished to see how many small insects drift back and forth across the trees. Sometimes I wonder if each one has a tiny parachute pack strapped to his back. Sometimes I wonder what it is they’re bailing out of or ziplining towards. And then the moon comes. And then all that soft indigo that goes on and on without end.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Vacations: the videopoem
Watch on Vimeo – watch on YouTube
What do we vacate when we go on vacation? What do we re-create when we engage in recreation? Here are four one-line poems (AKA monostiches) about summer vacation activities which may or may not answer these questions. One thing is certain, though: a bear in a berry patch knows exactly what she’s doing.
Process notes
Saturday’s collection of six one-line poems, “What we did on our summer vacations,” was a blog post of last resort. I’d actually spent much of the day trying to figure out how to make a video for the whale-watching piece, which I’d drafted as a haiku on Twitter the day before. I looked at a ton of free-to-use footage on the web, but didn’t see anything I liked, so finally I got the idea of writing some thematically linked monostiches instead. This turned out, of course, to make an excellent blog post, because so many of you responded by leaving one-line vacation poems of your own in the comments. I love it when that happens.
At mid-morning on Sunday, we got a real downpour, and I went out on my porch to shoot some video. When I looked at the results on Monday, I noticed a couple of interesting things. One is that I had unknowingly captured a box turtle struggling to cross the torrents of water in the road, and narrowly missing getting crushed by the tires of our neighbor’s truck. I was simply shooting the road without, obviously, paying a great deal of attention to what was in the viewfinder screen. This footage doesn’t appear in the above video, for the simple reason that I couldn’t make it fit, but it says something about my level of attentiveness while filming, I think. I did use two other pieces of front-porch rainstorm footage, however, one of them for the original one-liner about whale-watching.
I’ve always preferred the text-only approach to videopoetry when making haiku videos, and that seemed like the best approach this time, too. I was constrained in which poems I could use, because I wanted each to fit on a single line at a legible font-size. I thought about using a musical soundtrack to give the video a unified feel, but it seemed important instead to use found sound — and I got lucky, because someone on freesound.org had uploaded a recording of whale vocalizations made while SCUBA diving in the Pacific. I don’t know if they’re humpbacks or not, but what the heck. To keep the video from growing too long, I made each sound sample exactly 15 seconds long, and trimmed the video to match.
Thanks to the frequent crashes of my woefully inadequate video-editing software (Adobe Premiere Elements 7), I wasn’t able to save the project in a form suitable for uploading last night. This turns out to have been a good thing, because this morning I got the idea of adding some extra footage after each segment, which had the effect I think of giving each poem more breathing room, and also suggesting another interpretative dimension. A video that last night struck me as kind of hum-drum now seems to have the requisite pizzazz — though granted, my standards are fairly low. As for the content of that extra, unifying footage: it was a toss-up between a black bear and a millipede. The bear won.
Landscape, with Red Omens
Copper moon with hammered red ring,
halo of omens. Bird crest bloody
as a harpoon. Pinch back
the burgundy skin of hair-
covered fruit; then bite.
Tonight, news of rabid foxes
lurking at driveways’ ends.
High-pitched cackle from
the slaughtered hen.
How many stars by which
to reckon when the first
nor’easter blows in?
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
40 years in Plummer’s Hollow: an interview with my mom
Marcia Bonta: I was overwhelmed by the ride up through the dark hollow, followed by the sunlit opening at the top in early July. Then, while your dad talked to the realtor, the rest of us were out in the backyard filling our stomachs with black raspberries. I had never seen so many wild berries. That’s when I urged your dad to buy the place.
DB: How did Central Pennsylvania differ from other places you’ve lived? And how have your impressions of it changed over the years?
MB: I had loved our home in rural Maine, but I wasn’t fond of the black flies in May and June and the mosquitoes the rest of the summer that made the woods uninhabitable until the first frost. But I did enjoy snowshoeing in the winter and the frozen lake that allowed me to explore the shores on my snowshoes. I also liked the independent-minded people. I was devastated when we left because I had had five years of living in the country and didn’t want to live in a town or city again, as we had during our first years of marriage in Washington, D.C. and suburban Virginia. I knew, though, from our years at Bucknell University, as college students, and also the time we had spent at my grandparents’ home in Pottstown and at my great Aunt Mary’s home in Mahanoy City, that Pennsylvania had beautiful, wooded hills and mountains and that we would be able to find a rural home here.
When we first moved to Plummer’s Hollow, it was a quiet place filled with birds and animals. Over the years, the songbird population has dwindled and the trees, shrubs and wildflowers have suffered and continue to suffer from invasive plants and diseases that I couldn’t have imagined. I also did not imagine that the Tyrone bypass that was finished up after we moved here would become an interstate highway, that all around us our neighbors would have their forests cut unsustainably, that the increasing deer herd would eat much of the understory, and that the family-owned limestone quarry at the base of our mountain would be sold to a large corporation.
On the other hand, I could not have imagined the advent of three new mammal species on our property — black bears, coyotes, and fishers — all of which have added to my pleasure in walking our trails.
DB: Did living here influence your decision to become a writer? I seem to recall that your first publications were actually about our back-to-the-land stuff, and the nature writing came a little later — is that right?
MB: I started keeping a nature journal when we lived in D.C. at the urging of your dad. Whenever we visited a natural area, I recorded it. At the same time, I was reading nature books, especially those by Edwin Way Teale and Hal Borland. Then, when we moved to Maine, I continued reading and studying nature books and keeping a nature journal.
When we moved to Pennsylvania, I was so enthralled by what I was seeing here, I wanted to write about it and began with a nature column in the local newspaper that also included country-living material, patterned after Gladys Taber’s country books on her life in Connecticut. I also realized that no real nature books had been written about Pennsylvania and that there were no articles about Pennsylvania in the many nature magazines we subscribed to. That was the niche I hoped to fill. But we were also homesteading at the time — raising a couple pigs, bees, chickens, Muscovy ducks, and vegetables. Getting nature articles in magazines was impossible without experience and contacts, but a number of magazines, including Organic Gardening, were interested in publishing my homesteading experiences. When I wrote my first book — Escape to the Mountain — about our first five years here, I did include some material on our pets and gardening and had intended to write a second one about the rest of our homesteading experience. I couldn’t get that one sold.
I realized that “how-to” books were easier to sell and I was also interested in promoting Pennsylvania’s natural places, so with your Dad as photographer and driver, we went all over the state both for articles for state magazines and for a book. After writing two books about such places and numerous magazine articles, I finally had enough of a reputation to do what I really wanted to do, hence, my four Appalachian Seasons books.
DB: You helped stop the final lumbering in Plummer’s Hollow, as you described in Appalachian Autumn. What lessons do you take from that whole experience — about human nature, about our legal system, and so forth?
MB: Your Dad and I have always been naïve about humanity, so we tended to believe at first what folks told us about their motivations and what they were doing. We soon learned differently. Where land ownership is concerned, we were told that owners could do whatever they wanted to their land and if it impacted us, our only recourse was to sue them in courts after the damage had occurred. In other words, you need money and power to challenge the system and we didn’t have either. We also realized that most people who owned land on our mountain looked at it strictly as a cash cow and/or as somewhere to hunt deer. They believed that by continually cutting, they would produce young growth to increase the deer herd. And when they needed money, they called in a lumberman. They expected that the forest would regenerate as it always had and didn’t want to hear about the impact of deer and poor logging practices. They didn’t seem to know much about any of the other creatures or plants on their land. In other words, their approach, and, indeed, the approach of most people still toward the natural world is utilitarian, which is why humans continue to take rather than give to nature, thinking that it will always produce. I know many people think that those of us who care so much for the natural world don’t care about people. On the contrary, we realize that once we despoil every inch of the earth, as many seem intent on doing, humans will be the ones to suffer, more than they already are in such places as the horn of Africa.
DB: How has your perception of the natural world changed over the years as a result of living here? Or, to put it differently: How has living here informed your understanding of nature and biodiversity?
MB: By watching the changes from season to season and year to year, I have learned a great deal about nature and biodiversity. When we first moved to the country, back in Maine, and then here, I was happy just to be close to the natural world, but I only knew the identification of a few wildflowers, birds, trees, and shrubs. With the help of books and articles, this history and English student managed to teach herself something about the plants and creatures she was observing. Mostly, I learned to be a hands-off person where nature is concerned — a watcher, not a doer.
DB: Over the years we’ve monitored for acid rain, watched waves of invasive species come in, fought industrial wind turbines and strip malls elsewhere on the ridge, and may be witnessing more frequent, destructive storms as a result of climate change. Are you ever tempted to just give up, sell the place, and move the hell out of Pennsylvania? What keeps you sane?
MB: If we were much younger, I would be tempted to leave. But then, what would we do with this place? We’d have to sell it to get enough money to live somewhere else. I couldn’t betray this property like that because if we didn’t cut the forest before selling it, as almost everyone does who sells forested property, the next owner probably would. And since we have determined to grow an old-growth forest here and are well on our way in some areas, we couldn’t possibly sell it to someone else. Our son, Steve, recently revisited our old property in Maine and found that the forest on it hadn’t been touched, much to our delight. I don’t think the same thing would happen here.
Going out every day in our diminished world keeps me sane most of the time. Also, the knowledge that I am getting old and may be lucky enough to be off the planet before climate change destroys the place. According to the latest science, Pennsylvania will not be as hard-hit as some areas. Of course, that depends on whether we can keep our ample water supply safe in this state when the drier states run out.
DB: We’ve been conducting guided tours for Penn State environmental studies and landscape architecture classes for a number of years now. How did that get started, and what have you learned from doing it?
MB: Dr. Ian Marshall, an English professor from Penn State Altoona, who teaches nature writing as literature, contacted me about speaking to his class. That was back in the early nineties. They were reading Appalachian Spring, I believe. Then, he asked to bring a group up for a field trip. After that, he and Dr. Carolyn Mahan, a biology professor at Penn State Altoona, designed a brand new environmental studies program for the college and wanted more in-depth field trips here. Very soon, you joined me in doing that. Dr. Marshall told professor friends at University Park about our field trips and once a reporter from WPSU also came on a field trip and did a program about it. I think that’s the way the word spread about our all-day field trips in which you talk about forest issues and I about wildflowers, birds, etc. I also am asked to read from my books and answer questions from the class about my writing.
I’ve enjoyed conducting these field trips because I started writing to teach people about the natural world, in hopes that they would be interested in defending it and in studying about it themselves. Some of these students, at least, are interested in doing that. Writing is a lonely experience, and sometimes it’s difficult to know if you’ve reached anyone. Seeing and talking to these students gives me hope for the future.
DB: What advice would you give to young people, or anyone, thinking of moving to the country? Should they fix up an old place as we did, or build new to take advantage of green building techniques? How should they try and balance their needs with the needs of wildlife?
MB: If there is already a building on the property, fixing it up is more environmentally sound than tearing it down and building new. But if they fix it up, they should still take advantage of energy-saving practices, especially those for heating and cooling.
As far as nature is concerned, they should develop as little as possible and let nature have its way. Nature likes messiness. It does not like, nor can it utilize, vast expanses of lawn. I am appalled at how many folks move to the country and spend their time on a riding mower cutting grass. Why don’t they stay in a town or city? If they are afraid of nature or want to neaten it up, they should not live in the country. We need more wildness in this country, not less. If everyone who has a large lawn would dig it up and plant native wildflowers, trees, and shrubs, they would create badly-needed habitat for all kinds of creatures. In addition, taking care of such a place would be more challenging, interesting, and body-building than sitting on a mower.
DB: How do you envision Plummer’s Hollow 40 years from now, or 100?
MB: I hope the forest continues to mature, the wildflowers and shrubs increase in number and diversity, and the mammal species thrive. I fear that climate change, diseases, and other impacts will negatively affect Plummer’s Hollow. I would love to be proved wrong about this. In fact, I hope I am wrong and that humanity will change its acquisitive ways before it is too late.
DB: Any concluding thoughts?
MB: Without your father, my life would have been very different. He encouraged my writing, he became my photographer even though it was not an interest of his, and he agreed to live at and manage our place even while holding down a full-time job and long commute every day. He gave me the kind of home I had dreamed about. What a wonderful gift that has been and continues to be.
Visit Marcia Bonta on the web, and read her monthly nature column for Pennsylvania Game News, at marciabonta.wordpress.com.
Dear Annie Oakley,
I don’t even know how I started this
letter to you. Perhaps it’s the smell
of smoke that hangs in the air, thick
in the morning like carded wool, or
vapors swirling in the glass vase of
a hookah. A bald-faced hornet propels
his smudged wings in dopey, erratic flight,
back and forth across the grass. A fire’s
been raging in the Great Dismal Swamp
since lightning struck a week ago, un-
erring like your hand. Old legends say
a firebird built a nest of flame there,
which later filled with rain. In any case,
now I remember what it is I meant
to ask you— what were you really
thinking in that small interval,
between all those times you raised
the rifle sights and the bullet hit
its target? No time for doubt to spin
like a dime in the air, a speckled
glass ball, a marked clay pigeon?
Clatter of the tin plate leaving
your husband’s hand, thinnest edge
of the playing card sliced through
and through and through again.
I thought that before I turned
fifty, I’d have learned at least
a few of your tricks— But here
I am, rounding the bend, squinting
at landscape that’s mostly peat
and water. Who is that, ninety
feet away, leaning against a dry
tree and lighting a cigarette?
If I aim true, one well-placed
shot will put it out. Or we
could all go up in flames.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
What we did on our summer vacations: one-line poems
Line at the Restroom
They canoe across the lake to take a leak.
*
Seasick
He lies flat on the pitching deck among the humpbacks.
*
Unemployed Railfan
An appreciative grunt for the SD40-2s hauling Chinese shipping containers up the mountain.
*
State Forest
We drive through a small rainstorm that seems lost, too.
*
Outhouse Race
The occupant’s role is to sit still & look urgent.
*
In the Heel of Italy
Too hot to sleep, they call a friend in the U.S. & listen to him drink a cold beer.