Via Negativa

May 26, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Old China Hand

The old china hand is crazed with hairline cracks, in addition to the maze of painted lines meant to represent the archetypal palm with five trunks in whose dubious shade a palmist has taken shelter.

Her shop is deserted. The hand stands guard in the window, flanked by crimson curtains like a morning sky flushed with portent: sailors, after all, take warning from a single hair in the pilot’s rosy palm. If he wants to take a loss in the futures market, that’s his own business, but no one wants to see him go blind.

And though the palmist knows this simulacrum like the back of–well, you know, she has yet to notice the spider setting up housekeeping above the Mount of Venus, stretching a hyperbolic Line of Fate between thumb & index finger, & pulling it taut with a Heart Line to the far side of the Mount of the Moon.

The web blossoms like a handkerchief between the fingers, like a magician’s tissue of lies. Such legerdemain is not for the slight of hand. Now the spider waits for customers as warily as the owner of the hair salon across the street, a quintessential small-town girl who feels more than a little disoriented by the china hand’s cheerful, permanent wave.

May 25, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Five-second fables

If it walks like a duck, but leaves purple footprints, what then?

“My wish,” said the shipwrecked man to the genie, “is for a lifetime’s supply of lamps!”

The spider gazes at the dried basswood fruits and & is possessed by an Idea. She feels it stirring in her lower abdomen.

Without the constraints of tradition, there would be no culture, no art, no beauty! Or so we like to imagine, shaking our little green bells.

Only a savage would dance for no reason, making up new moves with every step.

May 24, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Lacrimae rerum

I went for a walk yesterday morning along the stream
I saw shadows & reflections mingling in the same pool

the reflections too mingled images & shadows

a mayfly dipped her ovipositor in the pool & a fern began to twist

& I looked down & saw my own body turned into a screen for the shadows of reflections
a flickering black-&-white feature

then the sun moved on

this is that stream you can’t step into twice

in fact you can never step out

outlines dissolve in the current
words fail
the vision blurs

May 23, 2006October 10, 2017 by Dave Bonta

Spring fields

In classical Japanese tanka and haikai poetry, “spring fields” (haru no or haru no no) was a stock image and seasonal marker (kigo). Every poem had to have some word or phrase indicating the time of year; “spring fields” actually connoted earliest spring, not late spring, as in these photos. At any rate, my favorite poem using the phrase is this hokku by Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828):

kami-jirami hineru toguchi mo haru no kana
*
I stand in the doorway
digging the lice from my scalp–
spring fields.

The mountains stand apart from us; that is their appeal. But the fields invite a more intimate kind of care. The Japanese Emperor Kí´kí´ (830-887) brushed this tanka for a lover:

kimi ga tame haru no no ni idete wakana tsumu
waga koromode ni yuki wa furi tsutsu
*
For you, I hurry
out into the fields
in search of spring greens.
My wide sleeves fill
with falling snow.

I’m not much of a fan of stock phrases or received opinions, especially in poems. But farmers are such rank traditionalists–one can hardly look at their handiwork without the familiar pastoral images crowding in. And here in Central Pennsylvania, at least, where the geology resembles a layer cake on end, you’re never far from a sudden insurgency of trees.

May 23, 2006 by Dave Bonta

An essential extension

Just yesterday I was deliberating over what to call a new section of links in my sidebar. Should I feature “Most Commented-Upon Posts” only, or go in a more subjective direction with “Most Interesting Comment Strings”? I’m not sure why I chose the former; it certainly doesn’t roll off the tongue.

And then last night comes this addition to the so-far brief comment string for Animal presence – as eloquent a demonstration of the virtues of quality over quantity as you’re ever likely to see:

Reading your words brought me back to the time I was still living in the States. Animals were a part of my daily existence even in the heart of Boston. I remember pipistrelle bats flying up and down my Boston apartment, the musk of skunks along the side of the Charles River as I bicycled home from work, the furious bumble bee banging its head against my bedroom window screen, night hawks croaking as they soared over the setting sun, and humpback whales, fin whales, and a thousand common dolphins breaking the copper water out in the Stellwagon Banks one utterly magical afternoon.

Can you imagine what it is like living in Tokyo where animals are more or less incidental? All my life animals have been an essential extension of myself, a language of movement and expression of place-integrated other-self (is there a word for that? well, I guess “animal” is it, in’it?) that have all but disappeared since moving here. I didn’t know it was possible to feel so poverty-stricken with money all around. A world almost exclusively human (albeit with genetically altered, deformed creatures called “pets” that live out their lives as possessions).

The thunderclouds are rumbling though, for me. Big changes have already begun. And I don’t intend to ignore the call this time.

The author is Butuki of Laughing~Knees blog. (Feel free to join the conversation.) Among all the possible kinds of comments, most of them welcome here – including both constructive and destructive criticism – those that could make complete and poetic blog posts in their own right are always my favorites. It’s the ultimate compliment for a writer, I think, when someone responds at thatÂ level. I should leave more such comments myself at other blogs.

May 22, 2006December 8, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Animal presence

Yesterday morning, I went to show my friend K. my patch of mugwort – the main flavoring agent in the beer we’d been drinking the night before. It’s out behind the shed, where I once had a perfectly round vegetable garden when I was a kid, but was forced to abandon the site when the mugwort took over. I had planted a few sprigs among the beds because a friend of my mother’s had said it would act as a natural insecticide. The same qualities that drive off insects – you can lay dried sprigs of mugwort among your clothes in lieu of mothballs – are proof against the commoner molds and bacteria that can ruin a batch of beer. It does as good a job as hops, with a similar effect on flavor, but without the latter’s soporific effects.

We found the mugwort patch in the possession of a box turtle, who did not seem at all happy to see us. I thought it was probably a female trying to lay her eggs, but when I came back later in the day, she had moved about four feet away and was still looking pensive and withdrawn. Perhaps she was looking around for the right spot – or doing something else entirely, who knows?

Come into animal presence.
No man is so guileless as
the serpent. The lonely white
rabbit on the roof is a star
twitching its ears at the rain.

A front blew in after lunch, while I was taking a nap. It was cold and drizzly when I lay down, and clear and windy when I got up. After tea, I went out with my camera, but took very few pictures. I was mostly content just to look at things. I dropped down the powerline a hundred feet or so to get out of the scrub oak zone and have an uninterrupted view: widely spaced clouds and cloud shadows all the way to the horizon, plowed fields alternating with patches of green. The big red barn in the middle of the valley had spilled its herd of Holsteins into the pasture.

A pair of red-tailed hawks lifted off from the trees below me; I lost sight of one right away, but the other circled far out over the valley, flapping, searching for an updraft. It rocked and veered wildly in the wind. One moment it was a mile away, the next moment it was coming in low over the trees. Each time it swung around so the wind was at its back, it let rip with that famous banshee cry so often wrongfully imputed to eagles in the movies, because, no less than a wolf’s howl or the midnight laughter of a loon, it’s a literal Call of the Wild. But even as I thrilled to the sound, I couldn’t help thinking that the hawk was simply saying “Wheeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

The llama intricately
folding its hind legs to be seated
not disdains but mildly
disregards human approval.
What joy when the insouciant
armadillo glances at us and doesn’t
quicken his trotting
across the track into the palm brush.

On the way back through the field, I kept thinking that I ought to run across a newborn fawn at any moment – the grass is long enough, it certainly seems like the right time. Instead, I surprised a mother turkey with poults – or rather, they surprised me. The hen must’ve been sitting on her brood to keep them warm, because she burst up out of the grass right at my feet. I had my camera at the ready, but couldn’t decide whether to try and photograph the poults, who were rapidly disappearing in one direction, or the hen, who was doing her broken wing act in the other direction. As I dithered, the poults scattered and froze, making them impossible to find, and the hen ran too far away for a decent shot. I sat down for a while, but was unable to wait them out.

What is this joy? That no animal
falters, but knows what it must do?
That the snake has no blemish,
that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings
in white star-silence? The llama
rests in dignity, the armadillo
has some intention to pursue in the palm-forest.

This morning I woke up around 2:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I snapped on the light and read for an hour. I’m reading Jared Diamond’s new book, Collapse, and I’m still in the first section, the chapter about Montana. If I lost sleep more often, I’d make more progress.

When I do get back to sleep, I dream about animals. In one scene, I’m with a crowd of people watching two fishers run along a rushing stream, much larger than Plummer’s Hollow Run but otherwise similar in its surroundings. The fishers find and corner a raccoon, kill him with a quick bite to the throat, and load his body into a small canoe. They tie the canoe to a rowboat, and each grabs an oar. “It looks like they’re taking him down to the river,” someone observes. Some sort of Viking burial seems to be in order. “Wow! Doesn’t this prove that animals have beliefs about the afterlife?” I say. “Not necessarily,” someone replies. “The fishers are probably just trying to send a message to other raccoons!”

Those who were sacred have remained so,
holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence
of bronze, only the sight that saw it
faltered and turned from it.

The others have continued on up the difficult mountain trail, but I linger at the campsite. I’m tired of backpacking in my bare feet; I must have footwear. I cut short lengths of saplings, and look about for vines. Instead, I find the corpse of a small hawk with an immense white wing locked in its talons.

Meanwhile, people are lining up in front of a small trading post beside the lake, which is about to open for the season. The white woman who staffs the place walks by and sees me trying to tie saplings to my bare feet. “Would you like some string? I might have a loose piece or two I could give you,” she says with a smile. “That’s O.K.,” I mumble. I don’t want to waste much more time. By now, the others will have noticed my absence, and might be thinking of turning back.

I pull several of the longest pinions from the white wing, which might be from an owl, I think. An old woman with skin the color of mahogany stops to watch as I try to sew up my strange wooden moccasins with the midribs, threads like flexible knitting needles. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing, gachó?” Her tone is grandmotherly, but I get the feeling she might be enjoying a private joke at my expense. I look more closely, and realize she is no ordinary human being. I wake up still mulling over my response.

An old joy returns in holy presence.
—Denise Levertov, “Come into Animal Presence” (The Jacob’s Ladder, 1958)

May 20, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Under gray skies

Under gray skies, on the snowball viburnum, I found a strange creature with branches on its back.

This, it turned out, was the larva of the Baltimore checkerspot butterfly (Euphydryas phaeton). Its host plant is turtlehead (Chelone glabra), which used to be very scarce here on the mountain until we got the white-tailed deer numbers down to a more reasonable level. Just last year, we were excited to find a big patch of turtlehead in a wet part of the field about a hundred feet away from where I snapped this picture.

The Baltimore checkerspot lays her eggs in clusters on the undersides of turtlehead leaves in mid-summer. The young caterpillars spin a communal web, like tent caterpillars or fall webworms, and over-winter as half-grown caterpillars just under the surface of the soil. The coloration of the adult preserves the orange and black from the juvenile, but white replaces the blue. These beautiful insects – the official state insect of Maryland – are yet another argument for longer hunting seasons and/or the recovery of top predators in the East – wolves and cougars.

May 19, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Stabat Mater

Fragment of a larger piece yet to be written.

The mother was beside herself
with grief–that’s all we know.
My gaze shifts from one to the other:
the original an image of no-nonsense domesticity
& self-possession, & then the one in black
with the blurred edges flickering
like a candle in the wind. She must
lose her composure, to say the least:
the classical distances between each feature
collapse, or are warped by discord.
Tears will have made a gray muddle
of eye shadow (kohl) & carved gullies
into the foundation on her cheeks, & at first
she trembled so violently, no single embrace
could possibly have absorbed the shock.
I would have had to brace myself against
the nearest wall, which might have seemed
solid enough, held up as it was
by so many others, & behind them,
all the so-called laws of physics.
Or that seeming tree that the soldiers planted
after they bulldozed the groves of ancient olives
where terrorists hid–I might have wedged
one sandal against its base. But think
back to your time in the Far East:
the apartment building would start to sway
in the middle of some innocuous conversation
about the weather, the wine would dance
in the glasses & everyone would grab
onto the table with both hands, as if that
would help. The throat goes dry, &
you begin to pray almost automatically
because words offer at least a semblance
of escape–an Indian rope trick
leading out of that void in the abdomen
where wisdom is supposed to take root.
And I can still picture the big one
that rocked us awake one morning
around 4:00, & we all ran out into the street
& watched the lampposts bowing to nobody
& heard the sound of glass shattering
& before it even hit the sidewalk, the sirens going off
one after another. You wouldn’t call that
a wail, would you–though our ears
insist on an anthropomorphic world.
You wouldn’t say unearthly, ungodly,
as if they meant the same thing.
The mother still stands.
You would keep your distance.

May 18, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Found object

What is a “blog”? In this paper, I will show that this is a question which is less easy to answer than many people think, at least those people who know what “blogs” are, which isn’t everybody. Most people think “blogging” is something that only started with the World-Wide Web, but Webster’s Dictionary tells a slightley different story.

Blog n [ME blaugh, fr. OF blaugget, doppelganger; chalk; a lead weight used to measure chalk] 1 : a chewy substance of emetic and expectorant properties, derived from a mixture of matzo, manioc, and diatomaceous earth 2 a : gases emitted by a swamp, bog, fen, or other stagnant wetland b : any similarly potent gaseous emission — blogacious, blogatile adj
vb blogged; blogging vi : to produce blog < who blogged? > vt : to subject a person or matter of topical interest to fresh blog < decided to ~ it>

So as you can see the word has been around the block for a while. Alot of places on the Web talk about “blog” comeing from “weblog”, but you can’t believe everything on line because people can put whatever they want to and their are no editorials. Also, it is a circular reason, if you think about it. The first people who stated “we blog” on computers, got the idea for that verb from somewhere else. Probably the dictionary. “Blog” cannot come from “we blog”, the Web pages that say that are irroneous.

Today you can see alot of “blogs” more than ten million, which is more than the wetlands that exist in America. But your average “blog” has onely two posts (post is what they call pages in a “blog”, which come down from the top of the page in the order posted). And no links except Google News and Link me. Links are how you find “blogs”, except for “blogs” that the owner does not want you to find, besides “Next Blog” on Blogger, if you click on it. They have names that are like the titles of books that you want to look into because the cover makes you think it will be cool, for example, Green Eggs and Spam. The authors write about their daily life and opinions, such as Tristam Shandy, only less wordy and with smileys.

Smileys are important to show the emotions, like when you say something sarcastic or just-kidding. They are not just the ones with a smile, but winks and angry too, besides alot more other ones. When people write comments they use smileys, that way if they don’t know each other its O.K. Comments go back and forth at the bottom of posts and is maybe the reason why they thought about “blog” comeing from we blog. But some “blogs” don’t allow comments, either.

Some “blogs” only write about politics and think they are reporters, in their underwear they say. Political “blogs” for the most part are concerned about Snark, like Lewis Carroll wrote about how it disappears when you get to close:

In the midst of the word he was trying to say,
In the midst of his laughter and glee,
He had softly and suddenly vanished away — –
For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.

Daily Kos and Boing-boing and Michelle Markin are the most popular “blogs” sites right now. Also Istapundit.

In conclusion, if you think you know what “blog” is, you can find a “blog” that is something else. MySpace and Live Journal, that some say isn’t “blogging” comes under the influence of Chat rooms and bulletin boards, but many “blogs” just have links and plagiarism from others, and you can’t see any smileys there. You should try it.

May 17, 2006September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Here there be Squirrels

Monday, 4:40 a.m. I should know better than to try and get started on laundry before daybreak. As I carry the clothesbasket out through the breezeway, I hear a fluttering of wings, and when I open the laundry room door and snap on the light, suddenly something is trying to perch in my hair, which is still wet from the shower, and beating its little wings against the back of my head. Something else is madly circling the tiny room. Carolina wren fledglings! I watched them take their first, do-or-die flights from their natal nest in the eaves just last week. They’ve made it about as far from home as I have.

While the one manages to extract its feet from my hair and flutter over to the window, the other bird falls down behind the dryer. And I no sooner set the basket down than the first one is clinging to the back of my head again. I haven’t had a haircut in about six months, and I guess it makes sense that a terrified and disoriented young wren would seek refuge in the only brown thing in the room. I reach back and shoo it off, and it flies over to the hot water heater and gets tangled up with the pipes.

Neither bird seems likely to go back outside until dawn. The dumber of the two is still fluttering madly in the corner behind the dryer. I could go ahead and start the wash, but the noise and rocking of the machine would probably scare the crap out of them – what crap remains. This has been a real shit storm, did I mention that? I back slowly out of the room, leaving the door open, and snap off the light.

I examine myself in the bathroom mirror. My quilted shirt seems to have taken most of the damage. There’s bird shit on my sleeve and bird shit down my back, but my hair looks O.K. Did St. Francis have days like this? Did he ever just tell the birds to bugger off?

Tuesday, 5:45 a.m. While I drink my coffee and listen to the dawn chorus, I’m watching the smaller of the two porcupines that lives in the crawlspace under the house eat my elm tree. The poor thing looks sparser every year, but what the hell – if the porkies don’t get it, Dutch elm disease will.

By the way, did you ever notice how many weird things we blame on the Dutch? Dutch oven. Dutch courage. Double Dutch. Dutch uncle. What is it with the fucking Dutch? I could go on, but I’d better stop out of respect for my ancestors – who were, I’m sure, quite normal, albeit Dutch.

The porcupine waddles out along a small branch and stands on its hind legs, freeing its forepaws to grab and stuff nearby twigs into its mouth. This reminds of the way the Baltimore oriole that I photographed two weeks ago used one foot to pull leaves in range of its bill. Unlike the porcupine, though, it was interested only in what was on the leaves, not the leaves themselves.

As I watch the porcupine, I find myself imagining in great detail what might happen if it fell. This is not unheard of, and evolutionary biologists hypothesize that the danger of impaling itself is high enough to account for the presence of an antiseptic chemical in the porcupine’s quills. There’s a lesson there, I think: if you write with a poison pen, make sure you have the antidote. There’s nothing that bothers me more than someone who can’t take what they dish out.

Wednesday, 10:30 a.m. Here there be Squirrels. One of them keeps looking in the kitchen window at me while I write; it has to hang upside-down off the drainpipe in order to do so. Every time I hear it rattling against the screen, I whirl around and stare back. Call me paranoid, but I can’t help thinking it’s looking for nesting material. I feel its beady little eyes boring into the back of my head.