Via Negativa

July 19, 2007December 8, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Viking Burial

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.

July 18, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Translating Cernuda

notebook

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.

July 17, 2007May 30, 2016 by Dave Bonta

It Didn’t Speak in Words

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).

July 16, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Garden

bottlebrush grass

The garden is a map that redraws itself daily.
Two paths meet in a head of grass.

bottlebrush grass

Route of wind & route of the ichneumon,
her witching sticks tap-tap-tapping
for the green blood of her quarry.

purple coneflower

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.

iron flower

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.

poppy

The poppies’ sea-green pods
swell like thought-balloons in the comics,
each one empty except for an asterisk.

lilies

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.

Watch Children

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.

July 15, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Money tree

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.

July 13, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Ghazal

magnolia blossom

The little boy with hemophilia
speaks in a whisper, they said.

The female traffic cop was too attractive.
People kept stopping to ask directions, I said.

While you were picking berries behind the house,
a bear walked down the driveway, they said.

A tanager, an oriole & a goldfinch, all males,
in a single tree at dusk: three flames, I said.

In Newfoundland’s only remaining ancient forest,
the trees are six inches tall, they said.

We stopped on the way home from D.C.
to read a historical marker for the Shadow of Death, I said.

July 12, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Three tanka

A tiny spider
has spun its web across
the lens of my camera.
I check the memory stick
for pictures of flies.

Slender bodies,
legs impossibly long,
translucent wings:
stranger than any daydream,
the crane flies float through the trees.

On the damp woods trail
my boots scarcely make a sound.
Squirrels keep throwing fits —
as startled as me, this July morning,
by the apparition of my breath.

July 11, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Luck

On the third & last day
of bear season, the hunter returns
to his perch on the boulder
more from habit than any realistic hope.
But every rustle in the leaves
still summons up the childhood
excitement of static on
a shortwave radio: some signal
that might come in, given patience
& a delicate touch.

So when the bear appears,
his breathing scarcely changes,
the rifle rises to his shoulder,
the scope to his eye
& the world
grows closer
by a power of ten,
centered on a plus sign
that moves along the great neck

to the suddenly immobile head,
snout riveted on something
just under the moss.
Then the claw’s shattering descent,
a fountain of dirt.
He watches as
the yellow jackets form
a furious halo.

July 10, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Invisible Ink

At first, it’s the palm
& fingers that bear
the purple ink of an hour
in the raspberry patch.

But the berry juice fades
as it dries, even on the palest skin,
or else the body somehow soaks it in:
by afternoon it’s nearly gone

& new, more lurid marks
have appeared on the back
of the hand & half-
way up the arm:

parchment where the dry nibs
tried their points.

July 9, 2007 by Dave Bonta

Death of an oak tree

The storm came in quickly over the ridge, bringing rain and lightning and strong gusts of wind.

Nine miles above, the sun shone. Below that, darkness and chaos: hurricane-force winds, temperatures a hundred degrees below zero. We are fortunate that most of the drama in a thunderstorm is over our heads; what we see is mostly the violence of catharsis.*

A couple days later, I found a big old red oak, a property-line tree, reduced to a tall, jagged stump. Even from a distance, I could tell this wasn’t the storm’s fault. Wind-thrown red oaks tend to go over roots and all — and it’s a good thing, too. Over the course of millennia, such regular uprooting is one of the few ways a forest soil gets turned, and many native species of plants and animals have come to depend upon the complex, pit-and-mound microtopography that results. Bole snap, as it’s called, is more typical of other species, such as the chestnut oaks that dominate these ridgetops. This, too, serves its purpose: standing dead oak snags are havens and cornucopias for wildlife.

A glance inside the stump confirmed my suspicion: carpenter ants were the true culprits here. Odd, isn’t it, that we refer to such masters of demolition as carpenters? Then again, their homes are no more destructive of forests than our own. And we are no less heedless of coming storms…
__________

*See “Fly Me to the Clouds,” by Paul VanDevelder, in the July-August issue of Audubon magazine.