Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
Christopher Columbus, log entry for November 3, 1493 (translated by Samuel Eliot Morison):
These islands are inhabited by Canabilli, a wild, unconquered race which feeds on human flesh. I would be right to call them anthropophagi [man-eaters]. They wage unceasing wars against gentle and timid Indians to supply flesh; this is their booty and is what they hunt. They ravage, despoil, and terrorize the Indians ruthlessly.
Excuse me while I spit.
Suppose you wanted to crucify a tree. Would you nail it to the ground?
Suppose you could undo some violent event of your choice. Could you recover the future as it had been before that break in time, so full of promise?
Suppose winter were all you knew. How would you explain the shape of a tree, the arrangements of its limbs, the gestures of its twigs? Would you ever assume such an outlandish thing as a leaf?
Suppose you’d been educated in the darkness, like a druid. How would you explain the effrontery of laurel, holding up its little, waxen effigies of shadow in broad daylight?
Suppose you could change position from one moment to the next, but you couldn’t change where you’d been. How would conversion be possible? If you left your past behind you, what’s to convert?
Suppose you planted each nail with the idea that it might set root…
__________
For more questions – and a few attempts at answers – remember to visit the Progressive Faith Blog Carnival, most recently at Blue Texas and Velveteen Rabbi.
She shaved her head to get closer to God, she said,
prompted by a line in a song by a band called Nirvana.
Or maybe that wasn’t the reason, & she simply
thought of it afterwards, running her trembling hands
over all that smoothness. God. Congealed light.
Stones rounded to a shine by ceaseless contact,
saplings stripped of their bark, that arresting blank
that fashion models cultivate in their stare.
White, white, sing a song of skeletons that dance.
She had followed the Dead for five years, she said,
& every concert was different & amazing. It was a lesson
in how to be natural, how to just be there. God
speaks through our impulses. If I get pregnant
or get AIDS, she said, it was meant to be.
She read omens in the flight of birds or the fall of a leaf.
This morning I saw a tree’s shadow lying on the lawn,
perfectly still, & thought about her
for the first time in years. What does it mean,
this absence remembered in the sun’s angular wake?
Is she still alive? Is she being looked after by men
in white coats? It ought to be possible to tell,
I think, suddenly superstitious. I scan the sky
over the ridge. A vulture can follow a rumor
for hundreds of miles without flapping its wings,
as close to God as any appalling truth.
From a blog on the other side of the world
comes an unblogly thing:
a piece of poem set in a concrete slab
at the edge of the sea, cast up on the rocks
like the sole survivor from a wreck of words,
or as if the poet’s voice, like Alberti’s,
couldn’t take fresh water in its gills
& had to be restored to its native salt.
*
Something about a poem in a public place
disturbs me. Every time I’ve spotted one
among the advertisements on a city bus,
I’ve had to look away. It’s like
surprising a couple in flagrante delicto,
or overhearing someone’s cellphone conversation
with their therapist. At least with a reading,
merciful silence follows, & the bare podium.
*
Then there’s this business of objectification.
Poems grow like agates in the dark,
each according to its own mysterious rules.
Like agates, they are common & impossible to market.
But marketing needs the claim of uniqueness
more than anything, so poetry
gets pressed into service to provide ballast
on the ship of foolish products & bland commodities.
*
Poets, however, are taught to value the concrete.
Seeing such weighty jetsam,
I conceive a sudden ambition for my own work:
to see it published up on the ridge
on some ostentatious boulder, enough in the shade
that lichens of every crustose & foliose form
would find my lines ideal for a slow, private,
thoroughly absorbing read.
You’re never far from a road in Pennsylvania. Fifty-eight percent of forested habitat lies within 300 meters of a road or permanent opening, such as a Starbucks parking lot. As a result, our wild areas are uniquely vulnerable to invasions of non-native, exotic species of all types. Ever since last month’s discovery of a healthy, mated pair of wool socks in the wild, I’ve been on the lookout for further evidence of a breeding population of feral socks.
The evidence found to date remains somewhat ambiguous. The above photo shows an obviously mismatched pair of socks in a multiflora rose bush adjacent to the parking area for a small parcel of public land in an old field-mixed hardwood/conifer forest ecotone. Multiflora rose (Rosa multiflora) is an aggressive colonizer of forest edges and disturbed sites, and its use by the escaped socks (Soccus vulgaris) demonstrates the kind of perverse synergy not uncommon among invasive species. For example, a study of the effects of exotic plant species on soil properties in New Jersey found that they created conditions highly favorable to non-native earthworm species. The earthworms combine with the invasive plants to help push native wildflowers, salamanders, and other vulnerable inhabitants of the forest humus toward extinction. Another example would be the way feral housecats (Felis domesticus) provide nearly irresistible targets for all-terrain vehicle riders (Homo magniclunes), luring them much farther from the bar and deeper into the woods than they would otherwise venture. Together, cats and ATVs put a real hurtin’ on dwindling populations of neotropical migrant songbirds.
So yes, the socks are cute and cuddly – everyone likes socks, don’t they? But the woods are not the right place for them. If you accumulate too many socks – and I know from experience just how easy that can be! – please dispose of them in a responsible and humane fashion. Especially if they stink.
A new theme at qarrtsiluni is open for submissions: an opening in the body. The editors are Rachel Barenblat of Velveteen Rabbi, an accomplished poet, along with my favorite author of all time, that rascal Anonymous. As Rachel explains it, they are interested in “physical bodies, orifices both natural and artificial, or corporate bodies, or communal bodies, the body of the church, a body of work, any kind of body that can open in any kind of way…”
In other words, the theme is very much open to interpretation. Have at it!
I have been reading Paul Zweig, and responding to his poems with poems of my own. On Sunday, I mistakenly wrote that the eponymous “Eternity’s Woods” was the last poem in that section of Zweig’s Selected and Last Poems, forgetting that there was one more (and hoping, I guess, to make an end of it). Oddly, my poem in answer to “Eternity’s Woods” seems to anticipate the forgotten final poem, which follows. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.
The End Circulates in the Wide Space of Summer
by Paul Zweig
I
We hardly speak.
You have been here so long
You are like another leg or arm.
We trot across the ice,
Approach the book, and enter it.
[Remainder of poem removed to avoid violating copyright]
* * * *
The Fish Swims Under the Mountain of the World
Sunrise, & the wren’s song bubbles
up from his feet. He dances on the wall
as the ridge turns crimson. Watching from
the window, I feel the heaviness in my chest
lifting like a field stone flipped by the plow,
turning its unmarked cheek toward the harrow.
This world was never a text. With the spring
plowing, arrowheads swim to the surface
of the field adjoining the large sinkhole
down in the valley where an underground stream
briefly exposes itself to view. You can follow it
back under the bedrock in growing darkness,
hunching farther & farther over until you’re down
on all fours & the water meets the ceiling
with a final gurgle. I think of this whenever
the sky in a poem shivers under the knife
of a wing. Some hide is forever being flensed.
Practiced fingers turn the outside in,
or pull & sever a slick fish-shape from
the mother of flint. What flesh did those stone
points seek, so near the valley’s own gullet?
The hunters left no record on the cave walls
that hundred-year floods wouldn’t have erased,
but elsewhere, a few pecked images remain:
dream creatures carved on riverside cliffs, or
on the spines of ridges hundreds of miles long,
these sinuous swimmers. Yesterday morning,
I walked the ridge crest as far as the gap
& stood watching the sun shimmering on the river
& glancing off the windshields of trucks
in the quarry beyond, back-lighting
their plumes of yellow dust. In a month
& a half, this view will vanish behind
a screen of leaves, & by midsummer,
the field next to the cave will be thick
with the rustle of corn, product of 8,000 years
of continuous editing. I come home to
the blank page with my gaze full of distances,
thinking of a fish buried under a hill
so the Three Sisters – Squash & Beans & Corn –
can sing their names into memory another year,
the pattern of scales replicated in the grain.
I too used to garden that way,
& could again. It’s spring. The first
mayflies are rising. Something leaps.
As I headed out on a walk this morning, I snapped a picture of this male song sparrow (Melospiza melodia) in full throat. Song sparrows hold forth virtually year-round, but in my family, for some reason, we tend to typecast them as prophets of eternal spring. For example, in her book Appalachian Spring (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), my mother noted under March 13:
Song sparrows are almost always with us, but March brings them in to pack their breeding territory as tightly and as early as possible. Despite the weather, which today was hazy and cold, they all proclaimed, “Hip-hip-hurrah, boys! Spring is here!”
Mom claims she got this mnemonic from an old National Geographic record. I’m here to tell you it’s not widely attested in the popular literature. But someone named Tomm Lorenzin has compiled a helpful BirdSong Mnemonics page that includes our family’s favored onomatopoeia (albeit with an extra hip) alongside two others: Maids-maids-maids-put-on-your-tea-kettle-ettle-ettle (the mnemonic Thoreau preferred), and Madge, Madge, Madge pick beetles off, the water’s hot.
As Dave Berry would say, I swear I’m not making this up.
I try to avoid reading music criticism as a general rule. The following passage from the Birds of North America Song Sparrow monograph (No. 704, Peter Arcese et. al., Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Academy of Natural Sciences, 2002) wouldn’t seem out of place in the liner notes for some old Eliott Carter record:
Song a varied series of 2-6 phrases; 3 or 4 phrases common. Introductory phrases usually with 1-20 pure notes or complexes, but [Citations omitted.]
One nifty thing about song sparrows is that, unlike with many songbirds, the human ear can easily distinguish between the songs of individual birds. Considering the abundant variations within a single bird’s repertoire, and the variations between the many regional dialects, there’s no wonder birders can’t agree on a single onomatopoeic interpretation. But the “spring is here” business may not be pure fancy. I think Frank Chapman (Bird-Life: A Guide to the Study of Our Common Birds, D. Appleton and Company, 1910) captured the essence of it in his description of what was then known as Melospiza fasciata:
His modest chant always suggests good cheer and contentment, but heard in silent February it seems the divinest bird to which mortal ever listened. The magic of his voice bridges the cold months of early spring; as we listen to him the brown fields seem green, flowers bloom, and the bare branches become clad with softly rustling leaves.
So hip-hip-hurrah, boys and girls – and Happy Equinox!
I have been reading Paul Zweig, and responding to his poems with poems of my own. This is the next to last 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.
Eternity’s Woods
by Paul Zweig
I
I have come to this house
Of soft angular stone, wondering
How much must fall away before I have nothing.
[Remainder of poem removed to avoid violating copyright]
* * * *
Water
I have sought to borrow inspiration
as others borrow comfort
from strange lovers. Let me
press my ear, I said, against
the scallop shell at the base
of your throat. Let me hear
the throb of the surf, & dream
of ships. What were we
talking about, again? I caught
nothing but a swallowed sob,
a corrosive drip. Compostela
remained a day’s walk away from
the Cape of the End of the Earth,
which was of course pure hype.
Right here in the hollow
where I grew up, I have heard
water trickling under the rocks,
& once my brother & I even dug
for it, four feet down through
a jumble of sandstone. When
we quit, the water sounded
just as loud as it had before
we started. I used to search
for a clearing in the woods
where, when the wind stopped,
the only sound would come
from a hidden spring. But
I didn’t want it ever to be found,
not even by me. Solitude
has since become my deadliest habit.
I don’t know what I am doing
here, talking to a dead poet as if to
my better nature, dreaming of poems
that would taste as good as water.
In revisiting a too-brief response to a comment from Maria about light (in reaction to Friday’s post on angels), I thought of radiation: a broader and more ambiguous concept than light. It came into my head because I had just been reading the headline story about new discoveries based on studies of cosmic background microwave radiation. After editing my comment, I remembered Sandra McPherson’s second book of poems, Radiation (Echo Press, 1972), and got it off the shelf. It begins with the following epigraph (translated by McPherson, I imagine, since no credit is given in the Acknowledgements). I hadn’t read this in at least five years, and was startled to see an idea I had thought to be my own (“we are what exceeds us,” e.g.) given such complete and eloquent expression. I don’t know the exact provenance of it, but as the online quote sites demonstrate, Paul Valéry was a brilliant epigrammatic thinker.
The color of a thing is that one which, out of all the colors, it repels and cannot assimilate. High heaven refuses blue, returning azure to the retina. All summer long the leaves hold in the red. Charcoal gobbles all.
To our senses things offer only their rejections. We know them by their refuse. Perfume is what the flowers throw away.
Perhaps we only know other people by what they eliminate, by what their substance will not accept. If you are good, it is because you retain your evil. If you blaze, hurling off sparkles and lightnings, your sorrow, gloom and stupidity keep house within you. They are more you, more yours, than your brilliance. Your genius is everything you are not. Your best deeds are foreign to you.
– Paul Valéry
