Trestle

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An old railroad trestle from an abandoned spur line crosses the Little Juniata River right where our access road joins the highway on the other side of County Bridge 45.

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I had to meet a ride down there yesterday morning around sunrise, so I brought my camera along.

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It was the coldest morning of the year so far – 2 degrees Fahrenheit. This was a bit of a shock, coming right after several days of unseasonable warmth. But it meant that the air was as clear as it gets, and the river had a thin layer of freshly-knit ice along the shore.

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When the sun rose, the surface of the water came alive with swirls and streamers of rising mist.

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I took dozens of pictures, most of which completely failed to capture the beauty all around me. In the same way that writing poetry forces one to confront the limits of language, taking pictures makes one appreciate the gulf between icon and vision.

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Last summer, some of the local kids turned the river below the trestle into a swimming hole. They climbed all over the trestle, too, and fought boredom by vandalizing the railings of “our” bridge. During the colder months, the area around the bridge becomes much quieter – a good, out-of-the-way place for a variety of illicit transactions, most of which occur after dark. People seek transcendence in all kinds of ways, most of them as fruitless as my attempts to cling to ephemera through words or pixels. As for the trestle, it ends abruptly at the far side of the river, the victim of a highway widening project some fifteen years ago. Not even a ghost train could cross it now.

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Lost in thought: poems of Lady Izumi

This morning, for no particular reason, I thought I’d try my hand at some translations of tanka by the Japanese court poet Izumi Shikibu (fl. ca. 1000 CE). I included versions of the first two tanka in earlier posts, back in January and February of 2004.

UPDATE (Feb. 22): I’ve revised the first of these in response to the astute critique and observations of reader Hari Prasad (no web address) in the comments [subsequently lost]

If the one I wait for came now,
what would I do?
Gazing at my garden,
I’m loathe to see anything spoil
its trackless snow.

*

We hold the flowers
in our thoughts
after we pass,
entrusting ourselves completely
to the oblivious horses.

*

If I could see you one more time,
even if only by lightning flash
in a night-time storm –
visible, invisible –
it would ease my longing.

(Mourning a deceased lover.)

*

Once we’re beyond this world,
there’s nothing to cling to –
so thinking, I imagine
you here once again, your reply,
that give-&-take.

*

Which of us
would she miss the most?
She would miss her children
as I am missing mine,
my own dead daughter.

*

To be here to find
your name freshly written,
instead of moldering beside you
under the moss –
it’s hard to bear.

(After receiving a piece of mail addressed to her dead daughter.)

*

Lost in thought,
watching a firefly rise
out of the marsh
as if from my own body,
as if it were me.

Night

This entry is part 40 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

 

I’ve been reading Paul Zweig, and responding to his poems with poems of my own. This is the twenty-fourth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of Zweig’s Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after a week or two to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

The Taking Away
by Paul Zweig

The close-fitting sleepless night,
Everything still: the woodchuck in its hole
Under the rock pile, the apple tree outside my window.
[…]

* * * *

Outside In

A night of wind
& the smell of thawed soil,
rustle of nightcrawlers
tugging leaves down
under the earth,
rapid footfalls of rain.
At the woods’ edge,
a constant creaking
& groaning, as if
from doors swinging
loose on their hinges,
which are stiff with rust
from a lifetime in
the open air. I sleep
without dreaming,
wake without waking up.
Two more hairs turn white
according to schedule.
The house shakes
with the effort to keep
from flying apart.

Genius loci

Sucede que me canso de ser hombre.
Pablo Neruda, Walking Around, Residencia en la Tierra, II – translation here

It’s a little disconcerting to me how, lately, the moment I step outside, something happens. Tuesday late morning, for example, two squadrons of geese came honking low over the trees just as I started out on a walk, and mid-morning yesterday, a pair of A-10 Warthogs thundered overhead seconds after I walked out on the porch to pitch an apple core. This morning at 5:05, no sooner had I sat down outside with my coffee when the resident feral cat, whom I call Coyote Bait (C. B. for short), trotted up the driveway in the moonlight like a detachable shadow. It was so still, I could hear her paws on the gravel: a soft rattle, like the sound the stream makes during a prolonged drought.

Why should this surprise me? Only because I sit inside gazing at the computer monitor like a shaman peering into a crystal, where the merest flicker might foreshadow some fundamental shift in the heart’s climate. Everything seems significant at first, but after a while, it all blends into a gray sea of information, and I begin to tire of the whole human race – our never-ending chatter and busyness, our genius for exploitation.

Outside, meanwhile, the unseasonable warmth returns to melt the snow from last weekend’s storm. Late in the morning, when I finally go out with the camera, a bluebird is singing up by the barn, and a black-capped chickadee fresh from its bath is drying itself out in the lilac bush, puffing out its breast feathers and shaking its wings.

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The black-capped chickadee, Parus atricapillus L., is in the tit family (Paridae). Tits are “small, plump, small-billed birds; acrobatic when feeding. Often roam in little bands. Sexes alike,” says Peterson. Though they may appear comical to us, I think chickadees probably take themselves fairly seriously: witness the strict hierarchy maintained within their winter-long foraging flocks. Witness also their tendency to act as scouts in larger, mixed-species flocks and around bird feeders. When they sound the tocsin, all the other birds freeze, and when they issue an all-clear signal, everyone goes back to feeding. They’re like the boy scouts of the bird world. I remember once when I was burning trash, three or four chickadees flying in as close as they could to scold the leaping flames.

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Black-capped chickadees are among the brainiest of songbirds. Their social structure is complex; non-breeding chickadees can have memberships in several different foraging flocks at the same time, with different positions in the dominance hierarchies of each. Their simple-sounding songs contain much more complexity than unaided human ears can detect, enabling the communication of quite detailed information. Most astonishing of all, perhaps, are their memories. Chickadees have been known to hoard a thousand seeds and dead insects each day, tucking them into knotholes, under loose pieces of bark, even up inside clusters of pine needles. And researchers have found that they can remember which item is stored where for at least a month. Think of it: 30,000 or more distinct caches within a home range of twenty to fifty acres in size. Not even the most obsessed of human geographers can ever hope to know a landscape in such intimate detail.

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What of their ecological niche? Chickadees are foragers and scavengers par excellance. They can digest carrion from a gut pile as easily as goldenrod seeds, spiders, or wild grapes. Specialized leg muscles permit the acrobatics for which they are justly famous, and these contortions enable the gleaning of food that other birds can’t get at. I also can’t help supposing that their year-round, life-long residence in an area, following juvenile dispersal, contributes to their ability to exploit all available resources. With much denser plumage than other species of a comparable size, they are well suited to the vagaries of a northern climate. Each fall, they grow a fresh set of feathers, and portions of their unusually large hippocampus – key to their prodigious memories – also regrow.

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Large brains; organization into small bands; physiological adaptations to permit scavenging in an array of habitats: we could almost be talking about Homo sapiens here. But a vanishingly small percentage of the human race retains any experience of what it might mean to become so local as to begin to resemble the very spirit of a place.

Con mi mano rodeo la nueva sombra del ala que crece:
la raí­z y la pluma que mañana formarán la espesura.

Neruda, Naciendo en los Bosques, Tercera Residencia – translation here

Losing control

               elsewhere

Start from the knowledge that control is lost. Here, now, I’ve lost it, I’m naked. Breathe that in.

*

So his front end leaps over curbs, and his back end stumbles, and he falls in the street. If he walked, he would be fine. He just doesn’t know how.

*

He gave us the look that he always gives when he has just found himself on the floor: Why did you guys put me here?

*

(Thought: [if] otter hell is the life of a three-toed sloth, then sloth hell must be the life of an otter?)

*

What if we can’t stop the suffering? How do we practice from that point?

*

Blogging is a strange affair. On the one hand, in my experience it can be an effective aspect of practice; on the other hand, it can easily slip into what the Pali texts call papanca: the proliferation of thoughts, spreading out in all directions, without any prospect of finding a limit. The trouble with papanca is that it begets further papanca, and this can go on forever.

*

It was a fifteen mile drive to the graveyard, and I was still in the thick of a torrential acid trip and an escalating storm. I took it slow. Driving while tripping on acid requires incredible concentration. You really have to squelch all distortions of your perceptions and see what is really there. Do or die. You have to focus on your motor skills and reactions, and also, there’s the fear. THE FEAR. Just the routine underlying fear that’s always there when you’re tripping on acid. You are in an alternative state of mind where you really can’t be sure whether every atom in your body will suddenly unravel and fly apart sending electrons spinning off into space with the release of such intense energy that your brain can’t even comprehend what the end is like . . . but . . . I made it out there. I stood there in an ice storm looking down at the graves of my mom and my brother. I was completely wasted.

*

Who knew there were such mysteries inherent in taking out the garbage? Who knew that a lemon peel was so central not only to my sense of self, but also in the binding of a contract that delimits myself in relation to others? Who knew that taking out the garbage was a form of reassurance that “for one more day I have been a producer of detritus and not detritus myself”?

*

Snow all the way into the distance: I feel like a man losing his sight. The world dims with snow.

*

Teetering nervously in the gateway of an unknown garden where I’ve ventured only a few times, in the extremes of love and fear and grief that I’ve mostly managed to avoid. Could I, dare I, come here more often?

Scraps from the scriptorium

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The morning starts out gray, dull as a stone in the driveway. “The stone is a mirror which works poorly,” Charles Simic once wrote. But mirrors of any kind bore me. They always give the same answer.

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The structure of the wood must influence how the bark beetles excavate their galleries, I think. Is this the tree’s calligraphy, or the insect’s? I pore over my images with the intensity of a Medieval monk.

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The sky starts to clear. Icicles formed by a waterfall’s spray dangle trumpet-shaped toes above the current.

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A swayback mare and her foal graze at the edge of a snowy pasture. The rusty trailer, too, was once a blank white.

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I spot a ribbon – the kind used to wrap presents – winding through the branches of a ridgetop oak. A balloon must’ve brought it here. The last blue scrap of it almost disappears into the sky.

Fecal matters

I was fascinated by the Table of Contents for a book called Scatology, the Last Taboo: An Introduction to Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art, edited by by Jeff Persels and Russell Ganim:

The ‘Honorable Art of Farting’ in Continental Renaissance Literature
Barbara C. Bowen

‘The Wife Multiplies the Secret’ (AaTh 1381D): Some Fortunes of an Exemplary Tale
Geoffrey R. Hope

Dr. Rabelais and the Medicine of Scatology
David LaGuardia

‘The Mass and the Fart are Sisters’: Scatology and Calvinist Rhetoric Against the Mass, 1560-1563
Jeff Persels

Community, Commodities and Commodes in the French Nouvelle
Emily E. Thompson

Pissing Glass and the Body Crass: Adaptations of the Scatological in Théophile
Russell Ganim

Scatology as Political Protest: A ‘Scandalous’ Medal of Louis XIV
Jeanne Morgan Zarucchi

Foolectomies, Fool Enemas, and the Renaissance Anatomy of Folly
Glenn Ehrstine

Holy and Unholy Shit: The Pragmatic Context of Scatological Curses in Early German Reformation Satire
Josef Schmidt, with Mary Simon

Expelling from Top and Bottom: The Changing Role of Scatology in Images of Peasant Festivals from Albrecht Dürer to Pieter Bruegel
Alison G. Stewart

Tamburlaine’s Urine
Joseph Tate

‘The Wronged Breeches’: Cavalier Scatology
Peter J. Smith

From the Introduction:

Discussion of excrement is generally relegated to one of two extremes: the objective, clinical discourse of medical and social sciences (e.g., gastroenterology, psychology, anthropology) or the subjective, gross indecency of infantile insult or juvenile jest (e.g., South Park). The contributors to this volume reconsider this last taboo in the context of Early Modern European artistic and literate expression, addressing unflinchingly both the objective reality of the scatological as part and parcel of material culture – inescapably a much larger part, a much heavier parcel then than now – and the subjective experience of that reality among contemporaries.

If students of literature and the arts have hitherto and in the main been reluctant to tackle, or squeamish about addressing, scatology in earnest, a slowly growing number of recent works (e.g., Vigarello, Monestier, Inglis) have articulated for them and modeled, to varying degrees, socio-historical interpretations of excrement as process, product and experience. …

Evoking reactions of disgust and/or ribald delight, the texts and illustrations under examination unleash creative forces and responses that alter our perception of what the form and function of art actually are. Cultural suppression becomes subcultural revelation as what was once rejected as waste is now valued as inspiration. Or, rather, as at least one critic has likewise argued in a corrective to Bakhtin, the distinction between high and low culture, like the rejection and subsequent recuperation of waste, actually corresponds more to the way we have chosen to recover the past than to any real separation acknowledged among Rabelais’s contemporaries. As is the case in many of the Amerindians studied in Lévi-Strauss’s L’Homme nu, their excrement was always already useful, recyclable, both literally and figuratively; part of the effort of the following essays is to make that point.

If academic B.S. isn’t your style, a much more (ahem!) down-to-earth approach to excrement can be found in the Humanure Handbook. Its TOC includes such chapter titles as Crap Happens, Waste Not Want Not, Deep Sh*t, A Day in the Life of a Turd, The Tao of Compost, and The End is Near. According to the introduction, the author, Joseph Jenkins, had the rare honor of being censored by Howard Stern:

The Humanure Handbook … was roundly vilified on Howard Stern’s radio show where I was censored – twice! – for daring to utter words that no one must ever hear on the airwaves, including the “s” word (when I honestly asserted that one of Stern’s fake call-in people was “full of shit”). More surprisingly, however, Stern censored out the following statement I made during the interview: “I have composted all of my family’s humanure in my backyard for 20 years, and have grown a food garden with it the entire time.” These words were not allowed to reach the tender ears of Howard Stern’s audience. As soon as my interview was over, however, the listeners were instead titillated with playful songs about anal intercourse. Funny world, this. Funny creatures, humans.

High grade

Let’s cut down all the big oaks and make some money! Maybe even enough to pay taxes for a decade or two. They’ll grow back… won’t they?

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You’ve heard of clearcutting. But these days, private land in the northeast is much more likely to be subjected to what’s called high-grading, usually defined as “taking the best and leaving the rest.” The results may not look too bad from a distance: the smaller and more deformed trees remain to give the illusion of a healthy forest. Cut-and-run loggers easily convince landowners – most of whom do want to do what’s best for nature, according to surveys – that the forest will come back better than ever, and that wildlife will prosper in the meantime. It isn’t true.

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Open up the forest canopy, and whistlewood, a.k.a. striped maple (Acer pensylvanicum), springs up quick as a whistle, prolific as the white-tailed deer – which, like most other wildlife species, find it unpalatable. So if the deer are too numerous, as they currently are in most parts of Penn’s Woods, a second high-grading follows the first. Sure, deer are beautiful. So is whistlewood. So are the people filling all the new housing subdivisions…

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Given a more balanced deer herd, the land responds to acts of rape by arming itself with thorns: blackberry, raspberry, greenbriar, wild rose, black locust, or – as here – devil’s walking-stick, a.k.a. Hercules’ club (Aralia spinosa). All these species live fast and die young, preparing the way for longer-lived species and beginning to restore the ravaged soil. Most, including the devil’s walking-stick, are a bonanza for wildlife; this is why small openings are a valuable part of the forested landscape. After those openings close, however, it will be decades before their new coterie of trees can equal that initial burst of wildlife food. A poletimber stand can be as barren as a desert.

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Tree-of-heaven (Ailanthus altissima) stretches green birds’ feet toward the sky. This Asian native often invades disturbed areas, spreading in clonal mats that crowd out and poison the competition – and poisons are the only real way to get rid of it. Tree-of-heaven snaps easily, giving off a cloying, peanut-brittle odor, and easily re-sprouts. One secret to its success: the huge masses of wind-borne seeds, which, since they don’t need the help of wildlife, don’t provide much nutrition. Its “heaven” is the fundamentalist missionary’s pie in the sky, stealing all the sun from what’s left of those heathen oaks.

Claiming the Body

Body
of work
you make my heart race

body of evidence
weighed
wanting

body of knowledge
errata

body of the report
here comes
the red pen

governing body
hold me

body of water
hold me
up

body count
deadening
you overwhelm

body image
upside-down in the lens

body in motion
you rest
at a constant speed

body of Christ
one size
fits all

body of missing pilot
missing
missing

body of a Venus
elastic
full of give

body work
everything
comes into play

body art
thou.
__________

See also Chant for the Summit of the World Body