Tag: haiku

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Hiking with the Antichrist

descent path
of a regional jet
wild yarrow

Last night I watched it get dark from the bench at the top of the watershed—the head of the hollow where the old field meets the spruce grove. There’s a very misleading vista of forested ridges, which, because our own mountain is so low, manage to hide nearly all the valleys in between, creating the illusion of a Penn’s Woods with only a few scattered lights of cell towers and scattered farms. All of State College, a small city of around 40,000 in the summer, is hidden by the mid-valley ridge except for one water tower. It’s a good spot to watch the sky and imagine impossible things.

Learning what cumulonimbus clouds do at dusk on a June evening is of vital importance, just as it was earlier to watch the late afternoon light on mature-but-still-young oak leaves in the hollow among which a tanager and wood thrush were performing their greatest hits. I thought I’d spend the spring and summer hiking elsewhere, as I was doing last fall, but so far that hasn’t happened, between the garden needing regular attention and the high price of gas discouraging unnecessary trips.

What is truly necessary, then? Walking, yes, and sitting still from time to time. But when you’re lucky enough to have the run of a private forest two and half miles long, you don’t need to drive somewhere in order to walk. So many urban and suburban dwellers don’t have that privilege; I feel I should use it well and file these reports often.

*

Today, however, I decided to go hike my favorite stretch of Tussey Mountain — the part I see from the aforementioned bench looming off to the east, nearly 1000 feet higher.

dark forest edge—
sassafras extending
middle fingers

A popular spot to get high, judging by all the comfy-looking seats among the rocks. Good thing I’m not an influencer—I’d have to include myself in the photo, and the thing I like about this view is precisely the fact that I’m not in it.

Rock tripe. I love how they curl back as if ready to take flight.

Went off-trail among the ridgetop hemlocks for a while.

mossy rocks
as big as coffins
black-throated green

(That’s the warbler who allegedly sings Trees trees murmuring trees!)

It was worth going off-trail just to get up close and personal with all the contrasting shades of green. This is the true visual treat of late spring and early summer, more than anything blooming right now, even mountain laurel.

The main reason to go into wilder places is to be reminded that pretty much anywhere in the world will, given time, turn into a garden on its own. They’re out there, these aesthetically magnetic places. The fun is finding the small and unofficial ones. And in most cases keeping them to yourself.

What’s fun in the folded Appalachians — the Ridge and Valley section — is that all the places you know have echoes elsewhere, since habitat and forest use patterns tend to follow geology, which keeps running through the same, mostly edge-ways layers. Everything repeats—not necessarily in a Groundhog Day manner, but sometimes that, too. I can find analogues to our ridges at Plummer’s Hollow. In fact, I’m on one now. That’s what makes this so interesting to a stay-at-home nature freak like me: it’s the same but different. I can play detective as I walk, trying to guess the forest history.

Watch on Vimeo

There are an insane amount of black-throated green warblers along this stretch of ridge. I think it’s safe to say that if or probably when all the mature hemlocks succumb to the woolly adelgid, the black-throated greens won’t be nesting up here anymore. Then think of the countless acres of hemlocks as recently as 100 years ago, lost to the logging boom and never likely to come back, and all of the more boreal-type species that have declined or vanished as a result. Think about the trout streams that no longer held trout, and people puzzled that God’s bounty, as they saw it, might actually be contingent on good treatment of the earth and respect for wild and waste places just like it says in Leviticus.

Also, it’s interesting to watch forest succession in places with little history of recent human disturbance. My hiking buddy L. and I discovered this years ago at a very remote, nearly deer-free gorge full of dying old-growth hemlocks, the Tall Timbers Natural Area within Bald Eagle State Forest. It’s deeply sad that we’re losing some of these last fragments of eastern old growth to an introduced pest and a changing climate. But if you happen to have a lifetime’s knowledge of what forests in the Ridge and Valley tend to look like, you can still appreciate the specialness of a place where forest openings are filled not with ailanthus or mile-a-minute vine but mountain ash, sugar maple, or red oak.

Two military jets hurtle past a few hundred yards away, skimming the treetops. What an absolutely terrifying, inhuman howl.

I’m not a Christian but sometimes I think, you know, they might be on to something with the myth of Antichrist. Like, I don’t believe in Christ, but the Antichrist? That’s us. That’s our deathly hand around nature’s throat.

(No, I’m not listening to metal as i hike. That would seem blasphemous even to me!)

A large ground beetle goes into the ground, as is, one supposes, its wont.

I like to watch invertebrates simply because they make up an overwhelming majority of the critters I see on a day-to-day basis. Also they are cool as hell, obviously, and often terrifying if you make the mistake of looking at them through a hand lens. Even so I barely know a fraction of their names. Some of the more obscure ones may still be officially unknown to science, because taxonomy is hard and thankless work.

Damn, it’s chilly up here! Glad I decided to try out this longsleeved merino shirt.

I hate to sound like a fanboy, but I got this shirt for all the obvious practical benefits that people talk about only to discover the real reason for its popularity is that it’s such an unbelievably soft but smooth texture, almost like a second skin. When the wind blows, it feels amazing.

Maybe all athleisure wear is like this, and I’ve been missing out all this time? Too bad my nipples aren’t erogenous zones like a normal person’s. But it does mean less potential for embarrassment in the unlikely event I run into anyone else today.

It’s not silky but silk-adjacent, without the alien feeling of actual silk. It feels like something a mammal made.

Mostly I’m just happy for an excuse to deploy that hilarious, oxymoronic marketing term “athleisure wear.”

*

Garter snake sunning in the middle of the trail. You’ll just have to imagine it, curled into a single stripey loop—it looks much too comfortable to disturb.

I wonder when the last time was that someone went through? Certainly the clump of pale corydalis I found growing in the middle of the trail hadn’t been trampled. The Mid-State Trail may be part of the Great Eastern Trail network, but let me tell you, this ain’t the Appalachian Trail. I saw no one else all day. As usual.

*

We need to stop using the word “picturesque” for things that, upon examination through the back of a camera, turn out to have in fact no good pictures in them. That still trips me up, thinking that just because something looks cool that it’ll make a cool image. That’s like assuming that just because a person is good-looking, they’ll make a good model.

*

Because I’ve also hiked this trail at times when the leaves are down, stopping to take lots of pictures, I know there are way more cool old oaks, birches and hemlocks than i can see now. It definitely heightens the experience just to know they’re there. I mean landscapes are just like people in their uniqueness, aren’t they? No one expects to learn all there is to know about a person in just one visit. The world needs fewer travelers and more lovers.

Just tripped and nearly fell less than a hundred feet from the spot where I tripped and fell last fall. That’s some spooky shit.

I’M ALMOST OUT OF BATTERY. TELL ME GOOGLE HOW TO APPEASE THE UNQUIET GHOST OF A CLUMSY HIKER.

*

Cool, twisted old trees on my right, grouse exploding from dense cover on the left. That’s this hundred feet. It’s constantly changing, and I wish I could be present for the full wonder of it but wonder is exhausting so thankfully rare. I’m having a ridge experience, which is kind of the aesthetic equivalent of being in a perpetual low-level state of arousal due to one’s choice of shirt.

Found a boulder field to eat lunch on, sunning myself on the rocks like that snake, hunched over my sandwich. Boulder fields are cool and all, but these ridges would have fins like sharks had it not been for the icy breath of the glaciers fifty miles away for thousands of years.

Couldn’t find my second sandwich for a few seconds and I almost had a full-blown panic. I am not cut out for the wilderness.

I love the fast wolf spiders that prowl these rocks. I dream of seeing an Allegheny woodrat in the wild some day, but they’re so rare now, I might’ve missed my chance.

ridgetop wind
a black-and-white warbler
hisses back

“Light rain ending in 37 minutes.” If it weren’t for the excitement of failing batteries, technology would suck every last ounce of adventure out of a hike.

A view to the southwest of Plummer’s Hollow nearly hidden by curtains of rain.

Ah, the smell of cow manure, even this far above the valley! That’s how you know you’re in central Pennsylvania.

I hate whoever did this, no doubt choosing to camp under this ridgetop hemlock for its ambience, then carelessly building a campfire on its exposed roots.

Miraculously, it clings to life. Trees are tough up here.

I like trail registries if only for the surrealism of encountering a post office box in the middle of the woods.

My feet are tired but in a good way—that warm feeling they get after a good long hike. What did I learn today? Merino is amazing, and always bring the solar battery charger. Hiking with as much technology as possible is the way to go, really. I simply need to find a good dictation app so I don’t have to keep stopping to write down my thoughts. Then a 360° camera so I can record my hikes for a virtual reality experience. Then I’d be able to relive them someday when my knees are shot and the hemlocks are all gone.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Slug Life

great gray slug on tree hollow

six haiku written while sitting at one spot in the woods

great gray slug on tree hollow

invasive slug
the wood pewee bending
his one note

*

cool morning
the sun catches a spider
patching holes

*

a wasp on foot
the nervous trembling
of her wings

*

ancient seabed
a sudden roar
from the quarry

*

higher pitched
than my memory
first cicada

*

which tree
will be today’s gnomon
great grey slug

*

And here’s the nearly six-minute encounter that fueled all that, for those who have the patience (or a really good prescription):

Watch on Vimeo.

* * *

I just found these coral fungi less than 50 feet from my front porch. Why don’t I ever go back here? I muttered as I crouched down to take a shot.

coral fungi

Then I stood up and saw all the poison ivy. That’d be the reason.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Tell me we’re fucked without telling me we’re fucked

In American poetry as in our ordinary discourse, a kind of positivism reigns supreme, using language to expose, explore, and extract meaning. We bring this mentality to haiku in English and are thwarted, because in Japanese culture, language is considered to be such an inadequate vessel for conveying true thoughts/feelings that what isn’t said becomes at least as important as what is. (This is the point at which my own attempt to master Japanese faltered, as a young man in love with a certain style of discursive conversation. What’s the point of learning a language if you can never use it for robust arguments about ideas? I said to myself then.)

Haiku with its wealth of off-the-shelf natural imagery (kigo) represents an attempt to enlarge the overall cultural vocabulary for human feelings, which are considered much more recondite than most WYSIWYG Americans tend to admit. Suggestion and concision in haiku, tanka, etc., more than just arbitrary restrictions intended to spur inventiveness, represent openings for interpretive possibilities that require sensitivity and creativity to parse. So for American poets the challenge becomes “tell me X without telling me X”—a currently popular online meme formula. But rather than jokey photos, we work with two images or observations, a main one and a subsidiary one, joined by a semantic break in an almost kintsugi kind of way, mindful of the gap itself. According to the aesthetic values of Edo-period Japan, which still hold sway in traditional arts and crafts, in kintsugi “such ‘ugliness’ was considered inspirational and Zen-like, as it connoted beauty in broken things.” This wabi/sabi aesthetic finds parallels in a number of countercultural currents in the West, from Medieval monasticism and the whole Christian embrace of poverty and brokenness to the disruptive force of Eliot’s The Wasteland, and provides I believe the most reliable bridge between two otherwise quite different understandings of the limits and purpose of language..

There have been five upheavals over the past 450 million years when the environment on our planet has changed so dramatically that the majority of Earth’s plant and animal species became extinct. After each mass extinction, evolution has slowly filled in the gaps with new species.

The sixth mass extinction is happening now, but this time the extinctions are not being caused by natural disasters; they are the work of humans. A team of researchers from Aarhus University and the University of Gothenburg has calculated that the extinctions are moving too rapidly for evolution to keep up.

If mammals diversify at their normal rates, it will still take them 5-7 million years to restore biodiversity to its level before modern humans evolved, and 3-5 million years just to reach current biodiversity levels, according to the analysis, which was published recently in the prestigious scientific journal, PNAS.

Mammals cannot evolve fast enough to escape current extinction crisis

The brokenness of the world is far more urgent than it was in Basho’s day. If we don’t mind the gaps, they will soon swallow us and all our art and culture, because a world without beasts, a world where the immense creative power and resilience of nature are hidden for millions of years, is a world without poetry.

dancing flames—
a ruby-throated hummingbird
here and gone​

(via Woodrat Photohaiku)

There’s one wood thrush here with a markedly less pleasant song than the others. It’s sort of flat and minor key, and while still musically more interesting than most songbirds, simply does not meet the high standard set for wood thrushes. This thrush’s performances feel perfunctory, even dialed in. Two and a half stars.

I wonder whether I’d be more concerned about my legacy as a poet if I had planted fewer trees?

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Descent

river in November light between bare woods and mountain

What happens when we stop thinking of evolution as a ladder leading to us, which it most definitely is not, and start thinking about it instead as the story of our ancestors? What Darwin called the Descent of Man. Because that’s what we are: descendants. The paramecium is my brother! Or my ten-thousandth cousin a million times removed.

Paramecium or Paramoecium is a genus of unicellular ciliated protozoa. They are characterised by the presence of thousands of cilia covering their body. They are found in freshwater, marine and brackish water. They are also found attached to the surface. Reproduction is primarily through asexual means (binary fission). They are slipper-shaped and also exhibit conjugation. They are easy to cultivate and widely used to study biological processes.

https://byjus.com/neet/paramecium/

I strongly advise clicking through and reading the entire bit about paramecium reproduction, for a strong sense of just how simple things have gotten for some of us. Here’s what follows the section on asexual reproduction:

Sexual reproduction in Paramecium is by various methods.

In conjugation, two complementary paramecia (syngen) come together and there is a transfer of genetic material. An individual has to multiply asexually 50 times before reproducing by conjugation.

In the process of conjugation, the conjugation bridge is formed and united paramecia are known as conjugants. Macronuclei of both the cells disappear. The micronucleus of each conjugant forms 4 haploid nuclei by meiosis. Three of the nuclei degenerate. The haploid nuclei of each conjugant then fuse together to form diploid micronuclei and cross-fertilization takes place. The conjugants separate to form exconjugants. They are identical, but different from the earlier cells. Each exconjugate undergoes further division and forms 4 daughter Paramecia. Micronuclei form a new macronucleus.

Paramecium also shows autogamy i.e. self-fertilization. A new macronucleus is produced, which increases their vitality and rejuvenates them.

Cytogamy is less frequent. In cytogamy, two paramecia come in contact but there is no nuclear exchange. Paramecium rejuvenates and a new macronucleus is formed.

A Paramecia undergoes ageing and dies after 100-200 cycles of fission if they do not undergo conjugation. The macronucleus is responsible for clonal ageing. It is due to the DNA damage.

Paramecium is a real chip off the old block! And it shows us that aging is a choice made by evolution, just as sex is. Not all microorganisms do age. Most of we consider to be universal truths don’t even apply to all species on this planet, let alone to whatever other planets might have produced.

This is the logical flaw in Christian Bök’s Xenotext project, genius as it is: assuming that any “intelligent aliens” who discover the code would even have the frames of reference to allow them to interpret it. I mean, it’s also anthrocentric nonsense to believe that anyone from another planet would even care that much about us, other than perhaps to eradicate us as an obvious menace to all other lifeforms on earth, but that’s become sort of a new, post-religious article of faith for many who “believe in science.” (Pro tip: believing in science is unscientific.)

Wanting to have fixed, would-be truths in which to believe strikes me as so juvenile. Properly educated religious people learn not to linger at that stage, but who advocates for intellectual flexibility among the post-religious aside from a few morally bankrupt corporatist pundits? Well, Teju Cole comes to mind. Rebecca Solnit. And a bunch of more academic or abstruse thinkers who will never go viral for anything.

I wish I had more precise descriptors than “insects” for the winged creatures going back and forth in front of the porch this morning—all Diptera, I’m sure, but the lack of a general term for anything larger than a gnat but smaller than a cranefly is frustrating. And of course it’s telling: this is how much English speakers in aggregate pay attention to the natural world. Apart from entomologists and trout fishermen, who cares about a bunch of wee beasties (Scots English FTW) looking less like Victorian children’s book fairies than refugees from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

cool forest
a sunlit glade buzzing
with house flies

Having a ridge experience means, for example, getting to the top and forgetting to pause because no scenic vista is half as interesting as cool old trees growing among the rocks. What’s my destination today? I’ll know it when I see it.

Just stopping to type that, I’ve upset a hairy woodpecker. I look up and yep, there’s a tree with nest holes beside the trail.

I don’t want to get a better camera in part because not being able to capture quite everything is still a pretty good goad to write.

summer evening
a certain slant
of Dickinson

LOL.

stiltgrass
a black ichneumon wasp
thinner than death

(Ichneumons are the ones whose eggs hatch out inside living caterpillars—the inspiration for the Alien movie universe. There are tens of thousands of species, each specializing in one species of caterpillar.)

The evil impulse is such a great teacher, as long as you ignore its instructions. I refuse to elaborate.

Trying to take more artsy photos on my walk today, instead of just spontaneously reacting to what I heard and saw, dissatisfaction led to frustration led to boredom. Eventually I stopped taking pictures altogether, and began gathering yarrow tops for beer.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Report from Planet Oak

May 29, 2022

in the woods
surrounded by mystery
my thermos mug

The more I walk, the better I feel. But the longer I sit, the more I see: an oak forest in the spring after heavy defoliation by what we’re now urged to call, out of respect for the Roma, spongy moth caterpillars. And here let us pause and reflect how abominable it is to compare any insect pest, let alone one with such a potentially devastating impact, to a traditionally nomadic people living more lightly on the land than most. Roma have the right idea: keep moving. don’t stay too long in one place and let it break your heart.

the oaks’ mouths
are already open
little fledgling

monstrous
hunting spiders
that’s my shadow

A half-grown spongy moth caterpillar—one of this year’s much diminished cohort—climbs my leg: same bristle-brush as before. (The sponginess is entirely a feature of the egg masses.) Two of the canopy oaks nearby haven’t leafed out, but three saplings are there to fill the sunlit hole thanks to 30 years of good deer hunting on the mountain.

circle of stones
where some giant once stood
sporangia

caterpillar-
killed trees—the cuckoo’s
haunting call

impossibly thin
green beetle
please don’t go

The way any orchid is visibly more complex and intricate than the plants around it, so would aliens or angels seem compared to us. We would see our ordinariness, tumble from our self-centered, would-be heavens and begin to dwell more fully in our animal bodies. Or so I would like to believe.

mayapple leaves:
death starts out
as gorgeous spots

In the steadily shrinking vernal pool at the top of the watershed, a pale newt hangs tail-down in the water like a wraith among the densely packed tadpoles fattened on pollen—its prey.

Later when the sun comes out i watch it feeding: dash, gulp. dash, gulp. The cleared space around it is surprisingly small.

gust to gust
only the dead
trees moan

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Snakes and lawyers

river in November light between bare woods and mountain

Leaving the house to drive Mom to the lawyers’ to sign papers yesterday, I stepped on a six-foot-long black rat snake stretched across my front stoop. they are lovely people these lawyers, but sometimes life throws you a potent metaphor (i’m not gonna say sign).

There are at least two snakes of this size in and around my house, which as an *ahem* historical building, slapped together by farmers in 1865, is very much a semipermeable membrane open to all manner of wildlife. so the snakes while predatory on nesting birds—haven’t heard a peep from the Carolina wrens behind the fuse box in about a week—are still a better deal with the devil than a free-roaming cat would be

At the lawyers’ we got into a brief exchange about the way legalese while seemingly anodyne and boring actually represents a nonviolent distillation of conflict and confrontation. I said something to the effect of anyone who’s ever read the Icelandic sagas knows this and the head lawyer smiled sweetly and said not everyone understands that about us. it amuses me to think that the most Viking-like people in State College PA aren’t the fire fighters or even the violent drunken partiers after a Penn State game but a firm of property lawyers, expert at avoiding feuds between neighbors and keeping families from dissolving into open warfare.

the snake was fine by the way. or seemed to be—immediately drew itself into a tight coil with as much dignity as it could muster, then slithered at top speed toward its hole in the laundry room wall

Between sleep deprivation in the morning, the lawyers in the early afternoon, a rare late-afternoon nap and thunderstorms in the evening i never had time for a proper walk let alone the abbreviated three-mile version of it i was trying to squeeze in before dark (a great way to keep up daily walking during a heat wave). so it didn’t feel like a real day.

funny how whatever we do becomes how we define ourselves. it’s as if this has become my real job now. (because, thank Whomever, my mom is still in a robust state of health)

I haven’t read Stephen King which is probably good because i do sometimes find myself murmuring lines from the title track to Anthrax’ 1987 classic Among the Living:

I am the walking dude
I can see all the world

Cartoonish lyrics for the most part—Anthrax were never what you’d call sophisticated—but i still find this part vaguely interesting:

Good versus evil
The stand to vanquish evil
Man can only live one way
That place right in the middle

—a less Manichean worldview than, say, Black Sabbath in “War Pigs”

i had forgotten that Anthrax was with Metallica during the fateful tour for Master of Puppets on which Cliff Burton, their genius bassist and the working-class conscience of the band, was killed in his sleep when their tour bus went off the road.

His death profoundly impacted the thrash-metal community in which he was a highly regarded figure, and the members of Anthrax dedicated their new album Among the Living to his memory. In 2012, Ian said in an interview that part of the reason ‘… the album sounds so angry is because Cliff died. We’d lost our friend and it was so wrong and unfair.’

Wikipedia, “Among the Living“

with Cliff out of the way, the remaining assholes in Metallica were free to sell out and became the most famous thrash metal band in the world. Anthrax remained much more of a niche band, sounding like a cross between Dio, Exodus, and the Beastie Boys (who were part of the same NY hardcore/skater scene from which Anthrax emerged)

I am honestly not sure who i am blogging for at this point. the Venn diagram of metal heads and poetry heads has very little overlap i’ve found. astonishing that there’s any really. it involves mental toggling between the delicacy of perception required to appreciate (let alone compose) a haiku or a sonnet, and a much more blunt-instrument approach to language, with value placed on shock effect and sometimes deliberate obscurity. often metal lyrics are just flat-out bad writing. but there are three points I’d make about that:

  1. most popular music lyrics aren’t very good either. even a lot of Nobel laureate Bob Dylan’s lyrics are pretentious twaddle. let alone Puccini or Nat King Cole.
  2. prioritizing catchiness leads to very different lyrical choices than prioritizing subtlety and insights. and as impenetrable as thrash may sound to the uninitiated it is all about the riffs. bands learn how to write in such a way as to practically compel moshing and, um, extremely emphatic nodding along
  3. alternating between registers is something that traditional audiences all over the world seem to have loved, whether you’re talking about West African or O’odham epic recitations, comedic Kyogen performances in between the high seriousness of Noh, or, you know, Ben Johnson, Marlowe and them

the ancient peonies are in bloom in my disreputable front garden, which with the irises open as well looks about as good as it ever gets:

i transplanted the peonies from the front yard of our former neighbor Margaret McHugh, a descendant of the original settlers in Plummer’s Hollow. they were getting overwhelmed by wisteria (the peonies not the settlers, unless someone was buried in front of her house). i find their soapy smell interesting though not as much as Mom does—she dove nose-first into a big peony bush outside the lawyers’ office yesterday. sadly i failed to snap a photo in time.

the peonies’ timing is always excellent: just before a big rainstorm. assuming their goal is to flop over and return their ants’ delicate handiwork to the earth as quickly as possible. Alternating registers, innit. Buson once likened a rotten peony bloom to a hell mouth:

閻王の口や牡丹を吐かんとす
Enma-Ô no kuchi ya botan o hakan to su

the King of Hell’s mouth:
peony petals ready
to be spat out

与謝蕪村 Yosa Buson

Hiking in the rain again. I’m dry above and soaked from the knees down, which is wonderfully cooling. The rain comes with a breeze—the edge of a storm no doubt.

returning
the foot to its footprint
bear-flipped rock

Here’s a life hack to spend less time on social media: post about hiking until the algorithm starts showing you outdoors-related gear, then click on some of those ads. if you’re suggestible like me you do run the risk of spending money, but you probably needed new shoes or ultralight trousers anyway. the flip side is that every time you log into instagroan or facebonk you’ll be reminded to go for a walk instead

placing my phone in my shirt’s left pocket to keep it dry and feeling the warmth of its processor against my heart, this small computer many times more powerful than the room-sized supercomputers which our high school computer class assumed were the future…

(yes, my rural Appalachian school system had a computer room from the late 70s on. the Tyrone Area School District is legitimately progressive in many respects being run by basically liberal Republicans, though i suspect they would not appreciate that label. they work hard to not only graduate but also educate poor and working class kids: still not nearly enough, but better than any other school in the area including State College, if the results of universal, standardized tests are any indication)

(i remember those tests, or at least an early version called I believe the California Achievement Tests, which we not only didn’t study for but weren’t informed about in advance, just like an IQ test. I had aced the latter because of my upbringing: i knew how to talk like an adult, use big words and charm the tester. it was very subjective. i felt guilty about my placement in the gifted program knowing that everyone is gifted more or less the same and that the way we decide whose gifts matter is deeply unfair to people without either the gift of gab or an analytical mind. the CAT which we took in the 8th grade was a much more humbling experience, showing me to be as off-the-charts bad with some mental skills as i was off-the-charts good at others. they handed the results out in art class, for some reason, so kids from all tracks got to compare results, which ended up being extremely educational. I remember the kid across the table from me, a quiet, really genuine kid named Mark whom i’d gotten to know fairly well by then, showing me the bar chart of his results and asking me in a troubled voice, “Dave, does this mean I’m stupid?” and me with my gift of gab showing him mine, an almost perfect opposite to his: No Mark, i said, it means you’re really smart at these absolutely critical skills that well-spoken idiots like me sometimes like to pretend aren’t as important, just because we are so bad at them. [i forget exactly how they broke down intelligence but what Mark was brilliant at and i sucked at were mechanical/engineering-type stuff, and the reverse was like creativity and communication])

…and taking my phone right out of my shirt pocket again to type all that. Oh look, it’s stopped raining already!

brightening sky
a red eft hurries back
under the leaves

Dear diary reader, today after i got back from my walk i felt a sudden pang—i wanted to be making an erasure poem! going on a treasure hunt for fragments of fossil poetry in a coalface of prose. I miss it.

also when i took my sodden trousers off two ants tumbled out. that’s taking closeness to nature a little too far! i said to myself—then remembered my trousers had been doused with Permethrin. Poor ants.

Later, sitting on the porch, i was struck by how closed-off the forest edge looks now that all the leaves are out. Once inside, sure, it’s all green mansions, but from the outside, it’s a wall. so radically different from the view the other five months of the year when the leaves are down and it’s so open—more welcoming on the one hand but less inviting on the other. Talk about shifts in register.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Distracted

I waited with the Office upon the Duke of York in the morning. Dined at home, where Lewis Phillips the friend of his, dined with me. In the afternoon at the Office. In the evening visited by Roger Pepys and Philip Packer and so home.

office at home
her lips dine with me
on site

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Friday 21 May 1669.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Seasoning

Up, and to the office, where all the morning, it being a rainy foul day. But at noon comes my Lord Hinchingbroke, and Sidney, and Sir Charles Harbord, and Roger Pepys, and dined with me; and had a good dinner, and very merry with us all the afternoon, it being a farewell to Sidney; and so in the evening they away, and I to my business at the Office and so to supper, and talk with my brother, and so to bed.

where the morning rain comes in
a farewell
in bed

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 13 May 1669.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Seaside

My wife again up by four o’clock, to go to gather May-dew; and so back home by seven, to bed, and by and by I up and to the office, where all the morning, and dined at noon at home with my people, and so all the afternoon. In the evening my wife and I all alone, with the boy, by water, up as high as Putney almost, with the tide, and back again, neither staying going nor coming; but talking, and singing, and reading a foolish copy of verses upon my Lord Mayor’s entertaining of all the bachelors, designed in praise to my Lord Mayor, and so home and to the office a little, and then home to bed, my eyes being bad.
Some trouble at Court for fear of the Queen’s miscarrying; she being, as they all conclude, far gone with child.

May morning
alone with the high tide
my bachelor eye

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 11 May 1669.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Reflective

Up, and to the Office, where all the morning, and at noon dined at home, and then to the Office again, there to despatch as much business as I could, that I might be at liberty to-morrow to look after my many things that I have to do, against May-day. So at night home to supper and to bed.

morning ice patch
I might be
many things

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Thursday 29 April 1669.