Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
See also my Woodrat photoblog and my Flickr account.
The wound wells like a mirror
with the squandered coins of younger,
more legible selves, which otherwise
would’ve dulled from daily transactions
with weather, lovers, commerce.
A wound is the only way to wear
the heart on the sleeve again.
It salivates, eager to fold in upon itself
& complete the feedback.
The shadow of a butterfly shrinks
& vanishes in the middle of the field
& you turn & raise one hand against the sun,
unreachable in its crown of blazing thorns.
I have been capturing darkness from all corners of the sky
& passing it through the negative lightning of my body,
pressing hard with my one free hand to keep the earth
brown & solid beneath us, honeycombed as it is
with metals & aquifers & the pale shapes of our forerunners,
who burgeoned like gastropods from a single foot.
I have been taking notes in the margins
until the book is more mine than anybody’s,
& deserves an altar more than a lectionary.
My millennia of commentaries are dry as punk.
They will flare at the slightest spark & rise on black sails,
astronauts camouflaged against the missing dark matter.
I have inserted myself into your simple narratives,
the foil for your straight man, the chuckleheaded peasant
in your tragedies. My waistline expands like an empire
out to conquer the demons of appetite through assimilation.
The shortest distance bends & blurs. You can’t get
from Point A to Point B without doubling back.
In Norse mythology, Yggdrasil is the tree at the center of the cosmos.
Don’t forget to submit tree-related posts to the Festival of the Trees, which will appear next month at the outstanding science blog A Neotropical Savanna — details here.
It was a strange morning, one that began with a standard-issue gray sky and birdcalls I couldn’t quite place: a flock of pine siskins moving through the yard, gleaning seeds from the dried goldenrod heads. I had stayed up much too late the night before, watching television images shrunk to a few hundred pixels wide on my computer screen, sitting alone in a dark house and watching the faces of strangers wild with joy or stricken with disbelief. Now I felt a little giddy myself. What had I been dreaming in the intervening few hours? All I could remember were clods of dirt being shaken loose from large rootballs, black fists turning into bouquets of extended fingers, enough tubers to keep us fed for a long cold season.
Was it my imagination, or had the oaks almost all turned brown overnight? Leaves cascaded from their crowns, filling the newly open understorey with motion. A kind of transhumance, I thought, relishing the cognate with humus, which they’d eventually become. Deciduous trees are such masters of renunciation, of yearly sacrifice. If only we could practice the same kind of doing-without! Imagine what that might do for household and national economies, to keep ourselves firmly within such limits. But could we tolerate the kind of suspended animation trees go into each winter? Can we make ourselves as still and stubborn, as smooth and inscrutable, as seemingly inert yet full of vitality as an acorn?
Yes, I think we can. Hell, some of us have been living in a state of suspended animation ever since 2000, when the news media bought into the idea that truth is completely relative, and which year was the last of the millennium could best be decided in the court of public opinion. It felt as if we had entered a fully postmodern, alternate reality in which spin and ignorance triumphed. In that election, a great, if flawed, founding document of the country I live in was grossly violated for the first of what turned out to be many times. Less than a year later, when national disaster struck, we were told that heroism and sacrifice were the special privilege of those in uniform. We were told that anyone who wasn’t with us was against us. We were told to go shopping.
For far too long, Americans have been getting the sorts of presidents we love to hate: narrow selfish preening ignorant bullies. Sons of privilege with smirks on their faces — the kind we seem to elect to almost every office, starting with Class President in Junior High, perhaps because we feel that doing so will make them like us and treat us as equals. But not this time. This time, we’ve elected the weird kid: by his own admission, an outsider as a teenager, one with a funny foreign name and background, the wrong color skin, and bookwormy ways. Like “A Boy Named Sue,” he had to get tough or die — but unlike the protagonist of that song, he learned, he said, that sometimes the toughest thing to do was walk away from a fight, to meet an insult not with the outraged honor of a fragile ego but with implacable calm. And the kids who worked the hardest to elect him? Their energy and lack of cynicism fill me with hope. And not coincidentally, I think, a new and more vigilant, grassroots news media has arisen online. Maybe now we can begin to face some of the hard truths that Americans from all parts of the political spectrum have always been loath to admit.
The sky cleared late in the morning, the temperature climbed past 60 degrees, and the air filled with insects: gnats, wasps, ladybugs, honeybees. I went for a walk, trying to get used to the sensation of air flowing over my scalp. That feeling of a literal weight having been lifted. That newfound sense of vulnerability. The uncanniness of change.
[Edited 11/6/08, after I got a little more sleep]
Two garden seats, side by side:
one is full of leaves & the other, twigs.
It looks like an amicable division.
A spam comment touts Extraordinarily naked people.
I hear a train whistle & remember
the beast that stalked me in all
my childhood dreams.
Up in the attic, a freshly shed snake skin
is stretched across the pink fiberglass.
Such separations must be wrenching, however necessary.
A bluebottle fly clings to the top
of an empty water jug, immobile
from the cold. It’s a bad time of year
not to be warm-blooded.
I eventually figured out that I was simply
in the train’s way, & if I laid down
& flattened myself against the ties
it would thunder harmlessly overhead.
Perhaps those nudists too have mastered
the art of getting out of the way,
& their bodies are not merely unclothed
but transparent, so that you can see the food
dissolving in their stomachs & ideas growing
in the reptilian coils of their brains.
There are protocols for everything, even in the garden.
The wind is a very particular host.
some lights at a friend’s house
Halfway up the hollow, a dim row of lights below the road: the foxfire log. Starlight gleams in a pool beyond. Here and there, the high-pitched, whispery chittering of flying squirrels. When I reach the houses, I hear a familiar double chirp slowed to a fraction of its normal speed, like an old 78 played at 33 RPM. A lone katydid survives out of that whole, once-thunderous late-summer chorus. Kay… tee… Somehow it’s weathered a week and a half of freezing temperatures, and still finds the strength to call at 47°F. Kay… The nightlight glows through my kitchen window, faint as foxfire. Tee… I don’t think anyone is going to help it complete the phrase, not any longer. I hurry indoors, snap on a light, and log onto my email.
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”: that’s as far as I ever got with Frost’s best known — and most poorly understood — poem. Oh, sure, I finished reading the words, but my imagination never advanced beyond that initial image, which delighted me. To hell with the figurative meaning; the literal one was quite enough for me. I suppose I should be ashamed to admit that I often engage with poetry on such a superficial level, but you have to understand that we have several miles of old woods roads here on the mountain which seem much like the “roads” in “The Road Not Taken,” moss-covered, sometimes grassy, and ankle-deep in yellow (and orange and red) leaves this time of year, which whisper as you walk. And in any case, a yellow wood on a bright October day invites careless wandering. You can push regrets and fears of failure to the back of your mind for a while.
Archery season for white-tailed deer began last Saturday, so we do share the woods with a few hunters, who sit camouflaged in the trees, alert and focused on a single goal while we amble past, heedless as only an unhunted non-predator can be.
The yearly mulch is underway. I walk admiring the woods with a lazy gardener’s eye, willing myself to ignore multiple ecological wounds and see everything as if couldn’t be better arranged, as if each bush and tree were perfectly shaped and situated, as if every stone and clump of ferns stood in an aesthetically optimal relationship with its surroundings. It’s not a bad habit to get into, I think. The problem with the narrator of “The Road Not Taken” is that he’s too concerned about destinations. “Somewhere ages and ages hence,” he might think back on the choice he made, but what he’ll really miss, I’ll bet, is what he missed that day: the option to stay and revel in all that yellow.
The black walnut tree keeps dropping its ordnance on the roof. When will the fog burn off?
I’m not talking about financial fog, the fog of war, the fog of charm, or the fog of epidemics. I’m not talking about Fat, Oil and Grease, Friend of Girl, or Fear Of Google. I’m not talking about Utility Fog, in which microscopic robots link arms to form apparently solid furniture that can shape-shift on command, much less electronic fog, a mysterious phenomenon allegedly responsible for the Bermuda Triangle.
It’s a little confusing, isn’t it, all these fogs! I’m not talking about Alzheimer’s, the mental condition attending chemotherapy or chronic pain, or impediments to reading comprehension. I could be talking about a Photoshop effect, but I’m not, and for once I’m not alluding to existential ignorance, either.
I mean actual, honest-to-Whomever fog: clouds that form on the ground instead of in the sky.
Of course, when you live on a mountain, your fog might well be someone else’s cloud, especially in the winter and early spring. But this time of year, you can rise above the clouds simply by walking uphill. Or you can stay inside and wonder vaguely, between bouts of election-season-induced fury, who the hell keeps knocking on the roof.
I enter town by an alley off the railroad adjoining the parking lot for G&R Excavating and Demolition — “The Professional Homewreckers,” they call themselves. “No Job to Big or Small.” Sic. Walking into town on a quiet Sunday morning to use my sister-in-law’s computer, my route takes me along the railroad tracks and under I-99, where the 35-year-old overpass is undergoing extensive reconstruction. Workers have wrapped the massive steel girders with chainlink fence and covered that with burlap. It reminds me of a pupating caterpillar, the difference being of course that when it emerges from its chrysalis it will still be a highway bridge. I glance back at the end of our mountain, and see that it’s topped by a wisp of cloud that belies its diminuitive elevation: the sun-struck forest exhaling into the crisp morning air.
Continue reading “Back to School”
If you can’t see the slideshow, or if you’re on dial-up, go here.
Gnarled stumps of pine trees cut down a century earlier jut from the tannic waters of Black Moshannon Lake. Though like most lakes south of the glaciated portions of Pennsylvania it is a man-made reservoir, a smaller, boggier series of ponds preceded it, and descendents of the beavers that built the original dams remain. Last Saturday, my mother and I were admiring the banks of cardinal flowers in the streambed below the dam when a small birch tree beside the trail toppled over less than fifty feet away. We went over to look and discovered that a beaver had chewed it almost all the way through, presumably the night before, but for some reason had left it standing.
Black Moshannon is a pretty special place, home to rare orchids, carnivorous bog plants, and many other strange and wonderful things. Botanists consider the 1,500-acre Black Moshannon Bog Natural Area to be “the largest reconstituted bog/wetland complex in Pensylvania.” The park is surrounded by a much larger state forest on the Allegheny Plateau a few miles west of the Allegheny Front. I won’t give the exact elevation, because I know my western readers will laugh, but let’s just say that it’s high enough to be significantly cooler than most of the surrounding area. So the small swimming beach is always a major draw.
In fact, our main reason for going there on a beautiful, cool summer day was to introduce my three-year-old niece Elanor to the joys of a swimming hole. She’s always been drawn to water, but her fascination has included a healthy admixture of fear. With some coaxing from her father, though, and with the example of all the other kids to follow, she was soon splashing and yelling with the best of them.
My own interaction with the water was solely photographic. Like Elanor, I’m drawn to water and never get tired of looking at it: the plants that grow in and around it, the trees and branches that fall into it, the frogs that sit quietly beside it, leaping in at the last possible moment. By the end of the afternoon, we were each relaxed and besotted from our long immersions.
This is another postcard that will not appear on the fantastic new site postal poetry. That’s because I’ve joined Dana Guthrie Martin as co-editor, and we won’t be posting our own work. But we’re actively soliciting submissions from anyone and everyone else, and we’ve created a section where artists and poets can connect for collaborative contributions, as well. Come have a look!