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Posted on by Dave Bonta

Clarity

Up betimes, and shaved myself after a week’s growth, but, Lord! how ugly I was yesterday and how fine to-day! By water, seeing the City all the way, a sad sight indeed, much fire being still in. To Sir W. Coventry, and there read over my yesterday’s work: being a collection of the particulars of the excess of charge created by a war, with good content. Sir W. Coventry was in great pain lest the French fleete should be passed by our fleete, who had notice of them on Saturday, and were preparing to go meet them; but their minds altered, and judged them merchant-men, when the same day the Success, Captain Ball, made their whole fleete, and come to Brighthelmstone, and thence at five o’clock afternoon, Saturday, wrote Sir W. Coventry newes thereof; so that we do much fear our missing them. Here come in and talked with him Sir Thomas Clifford, who appears a very fine gentleman, and much set by at Court for his activity in going to sea, and stoutness everywhere, and stirring up and down. Thence by coach over the ruines, down Fleete Streete and Cheapside to Broad Streete to Sir G. Carteret, where Sir W. Batten (and Sir J. Minnes, whom I had not seen a long time before, being his first coming abroad) and Lord Bruncker passing his accounts. Thence home a little to look after my people at work and back to Sir G. Carteret’s to dinner; and thence, after some discourse; with him upon our publique accounts, I back home, and all the day with Harman and his people finishing the hangings and beds in my house, and the hangings will be as good as ever, and particularly in my new closet. They gone and I weary, my wife and I, and Balty and his wife, who come hither to-day to helpe us, to a barrel of oysters I sent from the river today, and so to bed.

how ugly was yesterday
and how fine today

seeing with
our minds altered

and the bright sea stirring
up and down


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 17 September 1666.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Descartes’ Three Dreams

~"Est et non" (It is and it is not)


Write a dream, lose a reader, 
a poetry teacher once proclaimed:
as if there were a difference between

story and dream, dream and poem, one
a train track cutting across the mountains
and the other the sound you hear as you turn,

restless in your sheets, close to morning. 
There are plants that flower only a single
night of the year, ghostly as hallucinations: 

and the stems out of which their creamy 
throats rise, the scaffold that sometimes 
,we call origin or history. Then 

there are stories about philosophers 
going to bed inside the oven of night 
waking to a dream where a book lies 

open on the table; words flickering 
on the page become a dream dictation 
they take with them back into the world 

where problems spill beyond the edges 
of chalkboards, with no solution in sight. 
But the body of a dream is more 

than a triangle or a cube, even if it is 
less than a single thread of a whirlwind 
that can spin you around on one foot 

like a top; and the book of instruction 
is a book of verse, out of which the warm 
smell of ripe melons brings the body 

back to itself. Therefore I can find 
no difference between the ticket I buy 
in the dream for going back to a country 

I'll never see again, and the low 
warning note that sounds as real trains 
depart from the platform. There are so many 

people in the dream station: magazines and 
coffee in hand, checking time schedules; 
crowding the counter for lost luggage.
Posted on by Dave Bonta

Demagogue

(Lord’s day). Lay with much pleasure in bed talking with my wife about Mr. Hater’s lying here and W. Hewer also, if Mrs. Mercer leaves her house. To the office, whither also all my people about this account, and there busy all the morning. At noon, with my wife, against her will, all undressed and dirty, dined at Sir W. Pen’s, where was all the company of our families in towne; but, Lord! so sorry a dinner: venison baked in pans, that the dinner I have had for his lady alone hath been worth four of it. Thence, after dinner, displeased with our entertainment, to my office again, and there till almost midnight and my people with me, and then home, my head mightily akeing about our accounts.

much pleasure
in talking hate

lying to the people
all undressed dirt

for our entertainment
my midnight head


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 16 September 1666.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

A Sleeping Octopus Changes Colors While Dreaming

while a dolphin likes to keep one part of its brain 
and one eye open. Some sea birds are reputed 
to spend so much time covering large distances, 
that they've developed the ability to sleep 
while flying. A sperm whale holds its breath 
as it naps near the surface, while gangs 
of meerkats like to sleep together, in pelted 
heaps. As time wears on, I find it harder to fall 
asleep especially after a long day at work; 
I come home but my mind's still racing. I envy 
bats and possums who can sleep through nearly 
an entire day, waking only to go hunting; 
or the walrus who, it's said, can sleep and swim 
at the same time. But first I would need to learn 
how to get over my fear of water, though I believe 
it could be one of the most soothing mediums 
in which to float. Recently I saw an ad 
for a float tank in a spa, where you can climb 
into a pod and lie back nearly weightless in salt 
water the depth of a foot. Then, someone gently 
pushes close the lid of the tank so all 
goes dark and external stimulation fades away. 
The only thing you'll hear is the distant 
percussion of your heart and your slow, deep
breathing. I'm tempted to sign up and try it.
Ideally it's a solitary experience, but personally
I like how sea otters have sometimes
been found holding hands while sleeping,
in order to keep from drifting apart.
Posted on by Dave Bonta

Climate strike

still from climate strike

A haiku video using footage of my partner Rachel preparing for last Friday’s global climate strike—an event led by schoolchildren in which adults were also encouraged to participate.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Alive

All the morning at the office, Harman being come to my great satisfaction to put up my beds and hangings, so I am at rest, and followed my business all day. Dined with Sir W. Batten, mighty busy about this account, and while my people were busy, wrote near thirty letters and orders with my owne hand. At it till eleven at night; and it is strange to see how clear my head was, being eased of all the matter of all these letters; whereas one would think that I should have been dazed. I never did observe so much of myself in my life. In the evening there comes to me Captain Cocke, and walked a good while in the garden. He says he hath computed that the rents of houses lost by this fire in the City comes to 600,000l. per annum; that this will make the Parliament, more quiet than otherwise they would have been, and give the King a more ready supply; that the supply must be by excise, as it is in Holland; that the Parliament will see it necessary to carry on the warr; that the late storm hindered our beating the Dutch fleete, who were gone out only to satisfy the people, having no business to do but to avoid us; that the French, as late in the yeare as it is, are coming; that the Dutch are really in bad condition, but that this unhappinesse of ours do give them heart; that there was a late difference between my Lord Arlington and Sir W. Coventry about neglect in the last to send away an express of the other’s in time; that it come before the King, and the Duke of Yorke concerned himself in it; but this fire hath stopped it. The Dutch fleete is not gone home, but rather to the North, and so dangerous to our Gottenburgh fleete. That the Parliament is likely to fall foul upon some persons; and, among others, on the Vice-chamberlaine, though we both believe with little ground. That certainly never so great a loss as this was borne so well by citizens in the world; he believing that not one merchant upon the ‘Change will break upon it. That he do not apprehend there will be any disturbances in State upon it; for that all men are busy in looking after their owne business to save themselves. He gone, I to finish my letters, and home to bed; and find to my infinite joy many rooms clean; and myself and wife lie in our own chamber again. But much terrified in the nights now-a-days with dreams of fire, and falling down of houses.

so much life
in this storm
like an unborn world

I am terrified in the night
with dreams of falling


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 15 September 1666.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Short Course in Public Speaking

How easily the voices of others rise
to the prodding of whatever question,

eager to make reply or find solution.
All the while, the instruments 

in the back make a quiet din 
from their tuning, tightening

a peg to cut the stutter out  
of a string. And it's taken me

years to learn to rein in the doubt
that makes an awkward wobble 

in the throat, to fill the little balloons
of confidence and launch them

toward the ceiling. In any room, look
away from their round and pleasant

bobbing; try to see whose hands  
are still stranded and fidgeting.
Posted on by Dave Bonta

Yeshua

Up, and to work, having carpenters come to helpe in setting up bedsteads and hangings; and at that trade my people and I all the morning, till pressed by publique business to leave them against my will in the afternoon: and yet I was troubled in being at home, to see all my goods lie up and down the house in a bad condition, and strange workmen going to and fro might take what they would almost. All the afternoon busy; and Sir W. Coventry come to me, and found me, as God would have it, in my office, and people about me setting my papers to rights; and there discoursed about getting an account ready against the Parliament, and thereby did create me infinite of business, and to be done on a sudden; which troubled me: but, however, he being gone, I about it late, and to good purpose. And so home, having this day also got my wine out of the ground again, and set in my cellar; but with great pain to keep the porters that carried it in from observing the money-chests there. So to bed as last night, only my wife and I upon a bedstead with curtains in that which was Mercer’s chamber, and Balty and his wife (who are here and do us good service), where we lay last night. This day, poor Tom Pepys, the turner, was with me, and Kate Joyce, to bespeake places; one for himself, the other for her husband. She tells me he hath lost 140l. per annum, but have seven houses left.

a carpenter come
to do strange work

found God
in infinite wine

serving the poor
and the lost


Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Friday 14 September 1666.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Sea Levels

still from Sea Levels

A renku (linked verse) sequence about sea level rise and the drowned Bronze Age forest of the Welsh Ceredigion coast, exposed in recent years by climate change-related storms. Here’s the text, for the benefit of the visually impaired:

low tide
we comb the ancient peat
for footprints

drowned forest
the gull’s cry turns eldritch

undead stumps
4000 years later
sprout bladderwrack

our shared excitement
at scraps of root-bark

seaside town
all the colors of ice cream
against the Atlantic

the high street is already
lower than the beach

Tisha B’Av just past
Orthodox Jewish families
stroll the sea wall

land marks us
sea levels us

beneath the waves
we are saying hello
and goodbye

Process notes

Summer is my least favorite season, so I guess it’s no surprise that I fell out of the habit of shooting videos for one-minute videohaikus sometime in July. But an August visit to the submerged forest at Borth and Ynyslas in Wales, scoured of sand most recently by Storm Hannah in April, revived my interest in shooting cellphone video, to put it mildly. I now have plans to finish up the summer sequence with four or five other videos, but this one is different: my first attempt at a renku video. (And at two minutes, it’s too long to share on Instagram. Boo hoo.) The poetry took some time to write, and I was continuing to fiddle with the last three verses up through the final editing.

There is a legend about a little kingdom in the Ceredigion Bay, Cantre’r Gwaelod, that was drowned thousands of years ago, based presumably on earlier glimpses of the ancient stumps, roots and peat. Or it may be actual folk memory; human footprints and artifacts have been found in the peat. There are also arrow-straight glacial moraines leading from shore out into the bay, which look very man-made—I was fooled—and no doubt gave rise to stories of an ancient system of dikes and causeways. All this folk material is very interesting but I didn’t feel it was mine to exploit, especially since Welsh poets have already done so, with the kind of intimate knowledge you only gain by spending a lot of time in a place. John Barnie’s The Forest Under the Sea (Cinnamon Press, 2010) is a great example of this. I was delighted to find a copy in a bookstore in Aberystwyth just around the corner from where we were staying. Here’s one of the shortest poems:

Cantre’r Gwaelod

I’m trying to recall the wreckage of my parent’s lives,
my brother’s,

confounded with claws and stumps on the shore
as

memory sweeps their images
out and in.

And another:

Low Tide at Borth

Terns have settled for a chat
at ease among roots of the sunken forest
like woodland birds before the tide
turns to reclaim its property, wrapping it
in salty preservatives; the terns

will fly, then, and screech and dive
for the silver mint of fish, the shoal
scattering and shining as did leaves in the Cantref
when a westerly blew and there was fierce
gale-light and no mercy.

We did hear from several people that Borth gets all kinds of savage weather. There only for a few days as tourists in fine, late-summer weather, what we see depends much more on what we bring to the place. For me, that’s a long-standing love of forests, a fascination with ancient Britain, and an environmentalist’s deep sense of foreboding about biodiversity loss and climate change. As for myths, there’s Atlantis, of course, but also, as a metalhead, Chthulu (“eldritch” is a word rescued from obscurity by H.P. Lovecraft). And though I’m not Jewish, a reference to Tisha B’Av seemed to fit: a day for mourning historical calamities.

Whether or not readers/watchers pick up on all that doesn’t really matter. The trick with haiku as always is to balance the sense of wabi and sabi with lightness and earthy humor. It’s the ideal form for travel poetry. Whether or not I’ve succeeded here, it does feel good to push myself and do something a bit more ambitious than usual.