Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
You have to blog THROUGH your lack of inspiration.
The sentence was pronounced —
huge, in fact — and awkward
on stage, forgetting half its lines
in mid-stream, waiting with baited
hooks for the trout
season to begin — or so the fish
warden was gamely told and retold
to the judge, who pronounced it
utter non-
sentence.
Follain’s concern is finally with the mystery of the present.
–W. S. Merwin
The aging transport ship
floats motionless
as the Newtonian surface of what
they still sometimes call outer space
dissolves around it.
The smallest of shudders
passes through the hull
& into the sleeping bodies
of the convicts,
the constellations change
in the monitor at the far end
of the almost-deserted lounge
where the chief engineer,
himself a convict, is reading
in an almost inaudible whisper
from Jean Follain’s
Transparence of the World.
__________
Amazon link. See review here. “Usage du temps” is the title of the 1943 collection which included the original “Transparence du monde.”
It was truly a Discovery Channel moment. Well, except for the fact that I was in the middle of taking a leak. After some twenty minutes of fruitless stalking, I had given up on getting a good picture of the sharp-shinned hawks screaming at me from various hidden vantage-points around the spruce grove at the top of the field. This is the third year in a row that they’ve raised a family there, and while extremely secretive as long as the young are in the nest, as soon as they fledge, the parents become quite vocal, even aggressive. Just about every morning for the past week, my mother had reported getting close views of them, but by the time I got up there in mid-afternoon, there was no sign of them. “They probably come back each night to the spruce grove, and hang out there in the morning before going off somewhere else to hunt,” she suggested.
Thus it was that around 9:30 on a beautiful, cool, Sunday morning I found myself in the narrow strip of field between the back of the spruce grove and the edge of the oak-cherry woods, engaged in contemplation of the wonders of nature. My bladder was only about half-empty I realized two things: a sharpie had landed in the black locust sapling right above me, and a large stick had just snapped at the edge of the woods about 50 feet away. It had to be either a human or a bear. I zipped up hastily, and a moment later caught a glimpse of a large, black form moving between the trees.
To tell the truth, I’ve never been quite sure that the kind of nature shows featured on the Discovery Channel or in National Geographic specials are entirely a good thing. I mean, if the goal is simply to entertain and to inspire, they’re great. But I worry that such shows raise false expectations about the sort of experiences people are likely to have when they go outside, where, let’s face it, your chances of seeing charismatic megafauna doing exciting things are pretty remote on a day-to-day basis — not least because most larger animals spend the majority of their time doing essentially nothing. Worse yet, the average person’s failure to see nature-show-worthy spectacles in his or her own neck of the woods might lead him or her to conclude, subconsciously at least, that preserving local wildlife habitat isn’t as important as, for example, Saving the Rainforest. How else to explain public silence in the face of runaway exurban envelopment, despite polls that consistently show widespread public support for Protecting the Environment?*
Those of us who have come to crave regular contact with wild nature have done so despite, or perhaps even because of, nature’s consistent failure to provide highly entertaining spectacles. There are lots of cheap thrills, if discovering a new wildflower or a fresh pile of coyote scat is your idea of a thrill. But really, wouldn’t you rather go geo-caching, or roar around on a mountain bike or an ATV? As one of my more urban visitors said one time when I tried to get him to go for a walk after several days of sitting around talking and listening to music, “I’ve seen trees before!”
Nevertheless, sometimes nature does — heeding the call of Oscar Wilde — imitate art, and this was one of those times. I snapped two quick photos of the sharpie before it flew over my head and landed on a taller locust tree a stone’s throw behind me. Then the bear reappeared at the edge of a milkweed patch an equal distance in the other direction. Jesus! Where to look?
Another thing about those nature shows: they’re culled from thousands of hours of film, taken by very talented photographers using very expensive equipment. My thrilling encounter with the black bear was fairly long by real-world standards — maybe a minute — and yielded one pretty good view, but the only picture I got was, as you can see, pretty darn lousy.
It was a medium-sided bear, possibly the same one my mom saw looking in her kitchen window last week. Mother black bears chase off their year-and-a-half-old cubs around midsummer, and these “teenaged” bears, like the one I was watching, haven’t yet developed the wariness of the adults. They’re still learning the ropes. As a result, this is always the busiest time of year for so-called nuisance bear incidents. You’ve just finished moving into your dream house in Ferne Hollow or Oak Pointe, and the next thing you know there’s a goddamn black bear going through your recycling bin like it owns the place. There goes the neighborhood!
This bear, however, seemed more interested in smelling the milkweed blossoms, which have a very sweet, almost cloying odor. It turned its head this way and that, as if breathing deep from a cornucopia of scent. Either that, or it had caught a whiff of Human, and was struggling to separate it from the powerful background soup.
I turned around to look at the sharpie, and realized it was sitting in full view for the first time all morning. I turned back toward the bear. It must’ve caught sight of the motion, because a moment later it was gone, crashing through the bottom corner of the spruce grove. In an agony of indecision, I snapped ten quick photos of the sharpie, then headed off after the bear, which I could still hear crashing around in the woods. I walked back along Laurel Ridge Trail hoping to cross paths with it again, but no luck.
An hour later, I had uploaded my photos to the computer and had just begun to go through them and realize how truly bad they were when my mom came back from her own walk down the hollow. She carried a large, orange and yellow moth on the end of twig, figuring I might want to photograph it. This turned out to be a royal walnut moth, the adult form of the famed hickory horned devil.
O.K., I take it all back: nature really is like the Discovery Channel — at least at the micro-level. Get a camera with a macro lens and you, too, can take eye-popping photos of wildlife in your own backyard: just ask Bev, or Cindy, or Rebecca. My mom was envious of my sightings up at the spruce grove, but her own find was the more interesting one, I thought. The royal walnut moth, like the hummingbird clearwing sphinx moth that came in to the bergamot in my front garden the previous afternoon, is not only easier to observe but also a great deal stranger than anything the furred or feathered tribes have to offer. And best of all, it’s not likely to flee if you stop to take a leak.
__________
*Logically, an environment can never be destroyed. That’s the beauty of abstractions: they make horrors seem manageable by removing all traces of the real world: no land, no air, no water, no endangered species or ecosystems; no messy places or individual creatures. This is why I call myself a conservationist and not an environmentalist.
The first four photos in this post were taken with the kind permission of the curator of the Fred Waring collection at Penn State, Fred Waring’s America, which I visited on a sudden whim yesterday morning. Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians “taught America how to sing,” they say; I can’t begin to imagine what that means. All I know is that this golfing buddy of Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, this once-renowned purveyor of bland, inoffensive, beautifully choreographed arrangements of big band music grew up in Tyrone, Pennsylvania, the only genuine celebrity my home town has ever produced. I went to grade school in the former high school that had been built on the site of Waring’s childhood home.
But it seems Fred Waring had his wild and crazy side, too. He devoured the comics, and his archives include hundreds of original graphic artworks drawn for or about him by the cartoonists he befriended. He was apparently also fond of wearing “distinctive and original, sometimes ‘wild-looking’, jackets,” as one display put it.
I grew up listening to the five-string banjo. My older brother started learning the melodic clawhammer style when he was ten, after a few lessons from my banjo-playing uncle, who was part of the New York City folk revival in the 60s and 70s. I love the sound of this most African and most stigmatized of American instruments.
The music Waring got his start with wasn’t Appalachian string band music, however, but the kind of post-minstrel proto-jazz then popular among the hipper white folks. It makes perfect sense that Waring would go on to become the Pat Boone of the swing era. Someone had to do it, and who better than a genial, slightly funky, nice-looking white boy from smack in the middle of a state which was synonymous, then as now, with middle America?
It must be said that Pennsylvanians come in all stripes, however. Later in the day I attended a function at Shaver’s Creek Environmental Center — also part of Penn State — and took the opportunity to visit the birds at the raptor center.
The birds on display are permanent residents, too badly injured to survive in the wild — less shadows of their former selves than living ghosts, some of them. They may never again rise on thermals over farm fields or ride the wind currents along a Pennsylvania ridge, but they and their handlers regularly tour the state, visiting classrooms, county fairs, and the like. I’ve seen them in action, and I think it’s fair to say that these birds, however diminished, are celebrities everywhere they go.
I can’t help wondering whether some such diminishment might not be a prerequisite for achieving celebrity status, in fact. We crave an encounter with wildness, with what we dimly sense to be a more authentic reality than our own, but without the danger and disorientation full contact might entail.
Shaver’s Creek also includes several miles of trails, a boardwalk over a wetland, and a beautiful little herb garden with a lily pond. Yesterday, the water lilies were in full bloom, and when I bent down to snap a photo of one of them, I realized that a green frog (Rana clamitans melonota) was sitting in meditation right next to it, like a Buddha that had just decamped from his lotus. I circled the pond, snapping photos. He never moved.
Walking down the hollow road this morning, I find a white breast feather from a large bird — a hawk? An owl? — lodged between a stem and leaf of foxtail millet. There’s a story here: some small mammal squirming in the talons, raking a feather loose.
Foxtail millet, fox grape, foxfire: pale imitations of their namesakes, lures for the unwary. The wild seen as deviance and degeneration from an original garden. Perhaps. It makes a good argument.
For more than a week, an ambush bug has maintained the same position near the top of a black cohosh inflorescence while the white bloom has migrated up the stalk. I nudge the insect with the tip of my pen to see if it’s alive, and it moves slowly to the other side of the stalk. Fairy candles, some call these midsummer blooms.
So many woodland flowers are white this time of year. Across the road, enchanter’s nightshade is in bloom, delicate white flowers that will turn into sticky little fruits — minimal burrs — and ride away in the silky fur of small animals: skunks, raccoons, foxes.
The skiff rides inside a wave
of sand. The grave-robbers
peel back the sod on the old dune
& take everything but
the bronze hammer of Thor,
an odd coin or two
& several crosses — hammers
on their way to being men.
They re-bury the skeletons
from seven graves in
this one small craft:
three males & four females,
all dead before the age of 30
from disease or famine
& now jumbled together
like beads from a broken cord.
The pastures are poor,
trees have grown scarce,
the land is hungry for wood.
With its sod roof back in place,
the boat can melt into the soil
until only the iron nails remain,
orderly rows preserving the shape
that faith once took.
__________
Revised 7/24/07.
Translating Cernuda on a cool summer morning, my body slowly warms as the sun clears the trees & begins beating on the porch. The cold drains out through my fingers & gets caught between the pages of the dictionary. A family of wrens — one adult & four juveniles — drops by to give me a thorough scolding. It’s true, I have no business doing this. To my ear, the words are single notes with few overtones, & I can rarely hear the whole music. The temperature climbs toward 70 degrees Fahrenheit — 22 degrees Celsius, according to the thermometer on the wall behind me — & I pull off my shoes & socks, prop my bare feet up on the railing & stare between my toes at a yard full of thistles. Two bees have already found the first purple bloom.
by Luis Cernuda
It didn’t speak in words,
It could only draw near: an inquisitive body,
Unaware that desire is a question
Without an answer,
A leaf without a branch,
A world without a sky.
Anguish opens a path among the bones,
Travels upstream through the veins
Until it comes out on the skin,
Upwellings of dream made flesh
To question the clouds.
A brush in passing,
A stolen glance among the shadows
Are enough to make the body divide in two,
Eager to take another dreaming body
Into itself,
Half with half,
Dream with dream,
Flesh with flesh:
Equivalent in shape, in love, in craving.
But it never gets farther than a hope,
Because desire is a question whose answer nobody knows.
*
No Decía Palabras
No decía palabras,
Acercaba tan sólo un cuerpo interrogante,
Porque ignoraba que el deseo es una pregunta
Cuya repuesta no existe,
Un hoja cuya rama no existe,
Un mundo cuya cielo no existe.
La angustia se abre paso entre los huesos,
Remonta por las venas
Hasta abrirse en la piel,
Surtidores de sueño
Hechos carne en interrogación vuelta a las nubes.
Un roce al paso,
Una mirada fugaz entre las sombras,
Bastan para que el cuerpo se abra en dos,
Avido de recibir en sí mismo
Otro cuerpo que sueñe;
Mitad y mitad, sueño y sueño, carne y carne,
Iguales en figura, iguales en amor, iguales en deseo.
Aunque sólo sea una esperanza,
Porque el deseo es una pregunta cuya repuesta nadie sabe.
__________
Luis Cernuda (1902-1963) was a Spanish poet and literary critic who spent most of his life in exile. He incorporated all his poems into one, regularly updated volume, La realidad y el deseo (Reality and Desire).
The garden is a map that redraws itself daily.
Two paths meet in a head of grass.
Route of wind & route of the ichneumon,
her witching sticks tap-tap-tapping
for the green blood of her quarry.
A bumblebee circumnavigates
the purple abdomen of a coneflower
like the hour hand on a lover’s clock
which always moves too quickly,
albeit sometimes in reverse.
The sun priests of the Aztecs
thought of the heart as a flower
& the dagger as a hummingbird’s beak.
A bad metaphor can be fatal.
The poppies’ sea-green pods
swell like thought-balloons in the comics,
each one empty except for an asterisk.
Where lilies are concerned, I like
the word better than the flower,
the idea better than the word,
the lilies of the forest better than the lilies of the field.
The children were tired of lawns & streets
and being watched.
They found a blank spot in the garden’s map
& never came home.
__________
Updated to add text at 5:35 p.m.
Back in the 1970s, when I was a kid, an old vineyard covered most of the slope behind my parents’ house. At the bottom of the slope, near the edge of the woods, there was a medium-sided red maple with big, spreading limbs where I used to climb and sit by the hour, dreaming of the tree house I would build. Sometimes I lay on the ground underneath the tree, gazing up at the imaginary floors of a several-story structure.
The horizontal part of the lowest limb contained a crack parallel to the ground, about an inch wide and 6-8 inches long, and one spring, on an impulse, I hid a couple of quarters in it. I liked the idea of keeping money in a tree, for some reason. I left it there all summer while birds nested and fledged in other trees and foolhardy hornets dangled their paper cities within easy slingshot range. Sometime in late October, after all the leaves had come down and I was no longer tempted to dream of green rooms, I remembered the coins in the crack.
Thirty years on, long after the last of the grapevines were killed by the burgeoning deer herd and the maple tree died and fell over, I find I have two competing memories about this. In one, I retrieved the coins, which had become a little rusty around the rims, and put them with the rest of my allowance money, to be spent probably on Edgar Rice Burroughs books. In the other, equally plausible memory, the quarters were gone — found by a raccoon, perhaps, or by one of my brothers. One way or the other, I’m sure I never climbed that tree again.
__________
Remember to send tree-related blog posts to me (bontasaurus [at] yahoo [dot] com, with “Festival of the Trees” in the subject line) by the end of the month for inclusion in the next Festival of the Trees.