Cibola 97
Shiwanna/Esteban (cont’d)
Don’t believe it.
Neither what you hear in Cíbola
nor the missed footfalls
of your jackrabbit
heart. Think
like a jackal thinks. Act
like a blacksmith: no
unnecessary blows. Remember
your unknown father
in whatever sort of heaven he may
still find good hunting.
They broke
the gourd: good riddance.
They stripped me
of amulets, bells & feathers,
tobacco pouch, even
the Holy Child
of Atocha: fine.
Maybe they’ll learn something.
From this cell I can hear
what goes on,
how they rush, argue,
fight among themselves.
Tonight I have nothing
but tomorrow I’ll make
their walls my armor–
you’ll see. They need
rain? I’ll bring it.
They’ll need protection
from Cortez,
from Coronado; I’ll be
their shield . . .
They have me figured
for a corpse. Well,
nothing cures whatever ails
like death. Old Bones,
you know what Hippocrates says:
we’re each sworn to guard
the other’s secrets,
yes? But in any case
you’re way too pale
for this climate.
That friar with
his shaved head sure ought
to earn a halo
from this, if only
to keep off the sun . . .
A good man, I admit. The rare
honest brownrobe, sure
of nothing but
God’s mercy. For that
I envy him. Still,
give me the license to think
my own, my will-
ful thoughts:
give me the desert
no one else wants, the shape-
shifting sands, the thorn-
scrub to explore
in an ever-diminishing circuit.
To chart, to map
in ever-growing detail,
right up to the smallest
spider mite,
a red mote in some vagrant angel’s eye.
For luck
More than once for luck I have placed my hand against the swollen abdomen of a pregnant woman, & perhaps this is why I have led such a charmed life (knock on wood). I remember in Honduras a patriarch laying his hand on the head of some small child or grandchild – casually, as if in everyday greeting: “Bendiga.” “Gracias.” And the child scampers off. But once, it, too, had been a nameless presence at the center of a woman’s body. The soul might well know everything before birth, a blind seer with a single working orifice, round & perfect as the good-luck doll the Japanese call Daruma – push him over & he always gets back up. Westerners may invoke Plato’s cave but in East Asia it’s Bodhidharma who sat in darkness, fat-assed legless zero nine years in the making. He even circumcised his eyes of eyelids to ward off sleep, that stealthy enemy of enlightenment. In Japan, Daruma dolls come in both sexes & the eyes are always left blank so the owner can paint them in, one at a time: the first when making a wish, the second when it’s granted. Aspiring politicians are especially prone to this practice, the Japanese equivalent of kissing babies. But only those without guile are ever truly blessed. Don’t be fooled; pregnancy is a dangerous business. The fetus feels the weight of your hand, it hears your voice & if you are careless in shepherding your thoughts it may think: Aha. You feel a sudden kick & draw back, only to receive a second jolt where you least expect it, unprepared for the jealous stirring from your groin, that flesh of your flesh grown desperate for blessings.
Words on the street
Cibola 96
Shiwanna/Esteban
The playing board retracts
its four scaly feet,
its tail,
its wizened head.
The players face each other
across the circle:
the red-painted gambler sits in the east,
the black-painted gambler in the west.
*
Each blows on his fingers,
whispers into his fists.
*
They toss the two-
sided sticks: red
& red
& red.
Red’s opponent feels the sticks turning
in his hands even before the cast.
Red & red again.
*
Now deep in the red, Black forfeits
more than his shirt. More.
More.
*
Stripped of rattles & feathers,
all his fetishes in
a muttering pile behind
his opponent’s back,
with his freedom now at stake,
what else can he put up?
No wife, no children–
I am all
I have left.
*
He removes his left arm
& sets it down by the pile.
Tosses the sticks:
red side up.
Removes his left leg. Red.
Right leg. Red.
Right arm. Red. Take off
your head. Red,
red: your ribs,
your vital organs . . .
__________
For more on the symbolism of black and red, see the notes to Cibola 52.
Weeds
Suddenly, beginning yesterday morning, my inbox is overflowing with German spam. Auslaender bevorzugt! Tuerkei in die EU! Deutsche werden kuenftig beim Arzt abgezockt! Graeberschaendung auf bundesdeutsche Anordnung! Vorbildliche Aktion! Volk wird nur zum zahlen gebraucht! Du wirst ausspioniert ….! And so on. The two that I open by accident contain no HTML, just Internet addresses. Clearly, the senders are “pharming,” trying to lure the curious or unwary into visiting a website where the seeds of malicious software lie waiting for new victims, new agents of dispersal. But why me? I don’t know a word of German. Whence this sudden invasion?
A few hours later I’m on a botanical field trip where one of the other participants is German and speaks authoritatively (albeit with a heavy accent) about plants and disturbance regimes, here and in Europe. We’re examining one of the few, tiny, remaining fragments of xeric limestone prairie in Pennsylvania. Why do European plants so easily out-compete ours? I ask. The German guy explains it’s because many of the northern European weeds have had a thousand years of intense cultivation to learn how to be aggressively weedy.
In North America, by contrast, the only really widespread form of anthropogenic landscape alteration was fire. Regular burning favors oak forests or savannas, depending on geology, exposure, moisture level, and other factors. This perpetuated openings that were originally natural, dating from a much warmer climatic period ending around 4,500 years ago in which wildfires were much commoner than they are today. Given fire, deep-rooted warm-season grasses can successfully out-compete cool-season grasses – mostly European imports. Large Pleistocene herbivores such as ground sloths and mastadons also played a role in originally creating these openings; in more recent times, the American bison helped spread prairie seeds between far-flung openings. Our trip leader describes an experiment with samples of different kinds of animal fur in order to find which would best transport the seeds of side-oats gramma grass, a prairie indicator species. Some pelts, such as deer and elk, shed the seeds immediately; the densely matted buffalo pelts picked up and retained side-oats gramma seeds like nothing else.
As with the wolf and panther, the wild bison still has a sort of ghostly presence in the Pennsylvania landscape, recalled by numerous toponymns: Buffalo Valley, Buffalo Creek, Buffalo Run. Run they did, but never fast enough. You can, however, still see them around – there’s a farmer who raises buffalo right on the other side of this hill, one of the local participants informs us. That really gets us talking!
We discuss spotted knapweed, a plant I only know from the railroad right-of way. Most of the invasive species in our hollow first appeared down along the tracks, hoboing in from god knows where. Spotted knapweed is that tall, rank stuff with the purple thistle-like flowers, but no spines. Turns out it doesn’t need them. It’s what they call allelopathic, poisoning the soil for other plants, and it’s potent enough to repel would-be grazers as well. Humans foolish enough to pull it out bare-handed may be susceptible to a nasty rash, but just as often it doesn’t leave a physical sign, going instead straight for the nervous system. You get recurring headaches, our trip leader says, and for a week or two, nothing will taste quite right.
Following local leads, we discover a previously unknown prairie remnant on the side of a hill above a plowed field; the owner mows it every few years because it’s a popular sledding hill in the winter. A number of indicator plants are intermixed with non-natives; the bright, orange-yellow patches of hoary pucoon are the most extensive we’ve seen all day. They intermingle with red columbine for a wonderful, natural garden effect.
One of the botanists shows us how to identify the planted pine trees: gather their long needles together in a sheaf and press them against the palm. If they bend readily, it’s red pine. If they threaten to go right through the hand, it’s Austrian pine. These are definitely Austrian, stout swords. We laugh nervously about possible ethnic parallels. Our erstwhile German participant has already bustled off to scout out other rare plants, convinced there was nothing more to be seen with us. Earlier, he had asked me to show him the location of another prairie remnant on the map. I explained how it was right across from the entrance to a very charming cave. “I have no interest in caves,” he said. It was impossible to tell from his intonation whether or not he meant that remark to sound friendly.
The strange thing about yesterday’s outing was that I had been to the first site we visited nine years before, but had absolutely no recollection of it. I figured something would eventually ring a bell, but nothing ever did.
*
Last night, I didn’t dream about either German botanists or Vorbildliche Aktion, as far as I can remember. In the last dream before I get up, a train I’m riding returns to the station so I can search for my boots. I had taken them off and left them somewhere without noticing how much harder and rougher the ground had become to my stockinged feet. In this dream – maybe in all dreams? – the surfaces of the world are as smooth as a lover’s thigh. But no true beloved could ever be half so innocuous.
The train travels backwards for one whole stop, disrupting service up and down the line. “We do this all the time,” the conductor says. “We’ve learned to accommodate the special needs of our passengers, who are uncommonly forgetful.” Everyone disembarks, and the other passengers wander off in search of coffee or newspapers. My companion helps me retrace my steps: over a metal bridge, through cobblestone alleys, into a slick-floored casino. Perhaps the boots were stolen right off my feet? I search through the Recent Acquisitions rack in a second-hand clothing store, and although I do find several pairs of army boots that look virtually identical to mine, none respond to my plaintive whisper. One large pair gleams, freshly spit-shined. They almost sneer. Their former owner couldn’t have made it through Day One of Basic Training.
In the very last place I look, there they are: old and comfortable, caked with limey mud, perhaps carrying a few seeds of side-oats gramma. Now I remember! But I had to swim upstream to the source, the very start of the dream. I take off the loaner pair of women’s boots – they’d been just a little tight – and step into my own with a sigh of pleasure. Read into this what you will. Me, I woke up. I lay in bed rehearsing the apologetic speech I would have to deliver to my fellow passengers. “From now on, I’ll always take the train,” I thought, “even if it never takes me where I want to go.”
*
This morning, a Baltimore oriole has begun persecuting his reflection in the window opposite my writing table. He’s not quite as aggressive as last year’s cardinal, preferring to sing rather than attempting a full-scale assault. From a perch two feet away he flutters up against the glass, singing loudly. It must confuse him the way his rival opens his beak at the same time he does, since his is the only song. He’s looking right in my direction as he does so. If I didn’t know better, I might think I was the intended target of his sharply worded messages.
Words on the street
Cibola 95
Reader (15)
Now let us return to our beautiful and delightful castle and see how we can enter it. . . . But you must understand that there are many ways of “being” in a place. Many souls remain in the outer court of the castle, which is the place occupied by the guards; they . . . have no idea what there is in that wonderful place, or who dwells in it . . .
SAINT TERESA OF AVILA
Interior Castle
Ah! The omen for staying here is not easy on things with souls.
A slave passes a late evening;
A slave doesn’t stay long among you.
He has become the jujube, one long mound of dirt.
Jujubes have become the hero’s portal.
The tree of life has become the covering for his nakedness.
SEYDOU CAMARA
Kambili (translated by Charles S. Bird et. al.)
The Hook
We’re in The Hook Natural Area in the Bald Eagle State Forest of Central Pennsylvania, 5,000 acres of silence and pollen. The 100-year-old forest is beginning to close in: open above, darker and denser below. Young hemlocks rising beneath the canopy of birch and oak resume their millennial project of bringing soil to the rock-strewn hillsides, needle by needle.
Black and yellow birch limbs torn down by January’s ice storm have one final flowering on the ground. Catkins long as fishing worms release clouds of yellow smoke as we clear the branches from the trail. I wonder if the parent trees can feel this reflex flowering of their dismembered parts, the way a human amputee is said to be bothered from time to time by the unscratchable itching of a ghostly foot? Pollen, like rain, falls equally on the just and the unjust. By the end of our two-mile walk, my boots have turned a gangrenous shade of green.
I kneel and crouch and lie on my belly, trying for an acceptable shot of an obvious subject. But the charms of painted trilliums aren’t as obvious as they first seem; these flowers are far more recondite than their large and showy cousins the wake-robins, for example. Given a better camera, would I see half as much? Each clump of trilliums tempts me with new possibilities, unique arrangements – redemption! But the picture taken in haste, with little thought, turns out the best.
For sheen, there’s shining club moss, rhododendren. Almost every other surface – living or dead, organic or inorganic – harbors some patina, colorful assemblages of moss, algae, fungi, lichen, monera. I think of all the orders of angels: so many different ways to feed on light and nourish shadows. The first-succession black birches and oaks will take years to rot, slowly releasing their sweetness back into the soil, long after this barely recognizable hemlock stump will have dissolved into the slightest pimple on the forest floor.
Hobblebush blooms at the bottom of a ravine, acres of ankle-breaking talus guarding it from its nemesis, the white-tailed deer. In the late afternoon sun, the blossoms glow as white as any warning meant to make a deer turn tail. A nearby waterfall already plays on night’s changes, oblivious to the drought that elsewhere cracks the moss. Why “hobblebush,” I wonder, for such a limber tree? Its shadow stretches skinny wet fingers over and under the stone.
Butterfly effect
A Boston Globe editorial entitled “Driving Out the Butterflies,” by Derrick Z. Jackson, concluded with my nomination for Quote of the Week:
Monarchs as a species are not endangered, but the migration is. The butterfly is losing its wintering mountains in Mexico, where millions of them famously cluster, to illegal logging. In its summer grounds of the United States and Canada, fragmentation happens in the form of sterilization. Suburban tracts and their asphalt and pesticide-protected lawns are wiping out meadows. On farms, herbicides meant to protect crops wipe out everything else….
“At some point, the fabric starts to unravel,” [biologist Lincoln] Brower said. “People ask me, What’s the difference whether we have a monarch migration or not? I say, Why do we care about the Mona Lisa or classical music? We care because it is a cultural treasure. We have to start viewing the natural world as a cultural treasure.”
This in turn reminded me of Pennsylvania poet Harry Humes’ poem “Butterfly Effect,” from his book of the same name. Humes riffs on the image from Complexity Theory, popularized by James Gleick in his 1988 bestseller Chaos, of a storm’s ultimate origin in something as minor as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings on other side of the earth.
Women turn away from sifting and measuring,
a man watches a deer stagger,starving, across the frozen river.
The horizon hardly stirs,and all the pianos are silent.
The bright wing of the skydrifts so close you could raise a hand
to it, the air delicateand your fingers itching a little,
as if something had landed there.
In another reminder of just how little we know about this planet against which we are busily committing ecocide, biologists announced this week that a species new to science, from what appears to be a previously unknown family of mammals, has been discovered in the mountains of Laos.