September 2009 – Page 2

September 16, 2009 by Dave Bonta

ID

Second syllable of what was once my name, now used only by the bank, by the government, and by certain few women who insist on it: you are like the necktie I long ago forgot how to fasten. No, scratch that. You are like that great bulb of an Adam’s apple I sported before my neck widened and absorbed it. I and D, you make me trochaic. You turn me into my ancestor, that quiet boy I suspect that I, as a Dave, would’ve hated, because he thought he was special, and not in the short-bus kind of way. A David. God’s favorite sociopath, going buck-wild in front of the ark: no David is ever quite free of that chaos, that cauldron, that id.

But Dave? A name without promise or poetry. Every Tom, Dick and Harry is named Dave now, you say — but that’s precisely the point. It was only when I freed myself of the i.d. that I started to discover who all I might become.

September 15, 2009March 6, 2014 by Dave Bonta

In and Out

Video link (subscribers must click through to watch).

The first part of this video may look familiar — I used it for a video poem back in July. At the time, I kind of felt I should upload a straight-up, full-color version of the footage as well, but video uploading is time-consuming and I never got around to it. Then on Sunday, the same guy who spotted the snake going into the house — our friend and caretaker Troy Scott, this time with his son Andy — spotted it emerging. You can hear all three of our voices on the soundtrack. It was fascinating to watch the snake figure out a new way to get to the ground, now that we’ve pruned out its handy walnut branch.

I’d like to say it caught all the mice, but in fact there’s still at least one. It ran under my chair just an hour ago.

September 14, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Dispatch from the Memory Palace

This is one of the things I’ve been working on lately instead of blogging here: the online version of qarrtsiluni’s first poetry chapbook, A Walk Through the Memory Palace, by Pamela Johnson Parker. Read our announcement post at the magazine, where you can also see the cover of the print edition — my co-editor Beth Adams’ work.

September 12, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Speechless

Like the beak of a severed chicken’s head
opening & closing in the dirt beside
the chopping block
while its former companion goes
through all the motions
of real life, I have
no words.

September 11, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Rain

I scan the sky the way others study
a lover’s face. It is
all I have. Three nights ago when
I went out to urinate,
the smell of rain was so rich I couldn’t
get enough of it.
I turned my face to the invisible sky
& stood there taking
great deep breaths, drawing the strange
air into my nostrils,
& when I went back in my glasses were
so wet I had to grope
for a cloth — swatch of cotton softer
than any skin.
__________

Sorry for my relative absense around here; I’ve been busy with qarrtsiluni stuff.

September 7, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Split

In a poorly lit temple museum in Japan, there’s a thousand-year-old sculpture in unpainted wood of a monk caught at the moment of enlightenment, his face splitting open like a cicada’s shell to reveal the monk beneath. This reminded me of that. In the first ten minutes after it goes into the oven, the dough experiences a burst of expansion before the heat kills it — or, if you like, transforms it into its next, immobile state. Many bakers, disliking irregularity, cut slashes into the dough so it will split where they want, and sometimes I do this too, but most of the time I prefer to be surprised by what opens and what stays closed.

September 5, 2009September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

On the Road to Santiago

My brother had chanted its name for days
until, voilà, it hung
a hundred feet above our astonished faces:
lammergeier, impossible to miss,
the open book of its body so wide
it could be read by the thinnest updrafts,
dark against the clouds —

& us standing by the very rock
that Roland’s sword was said to have split
when he fought the Basques & prepared
a feast for vultures. But this one
with its fully feathered head
& wisp of beard looked nothing like
one of those tonsured carrion-eaters.

We lamented its empty talons,
having fed ourselves on tales
of an expert locksmith
taking the bones one by one up
into the sky & letting them drop
onto some likely rock, there to glean
from the splinters the wine-red
marrow, mother of blood.
We watched it pivot,
rocking in the high wind,
then slide quick as a sword down
that long & boney ridge.

Click on the image to read the other posts in honor of International Vulture Awareness Day and learn why vulture conservation is so vital. Sentence-of-the-day award goes to Charlie at 10,000 Birds:

On the face of it, all this attention for a group of scavenging birds that are fairly universally seen as ugly, quarrelsome, and unkempt, dark reminders of mortality, and definitely not the sort of guests you’d invite to a dinner-party (“We sent the invitations out Mrs Vulture, I know we did — it must just be coincidence that both you and the Hyenas didn’t receive them…”) must seem a little odd (especially to any non-birder who stumbles across IVAD and who had probably assumed that we birders usually celebrate delicacy, beauty or song rather than excrement-coated bags of feathers who spend much of their day with their heads shoved up a rotting corpse).

September 4, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Cwm

One word, it doesn’t matter which,
can be the pebble that sets off
an avalanche. Careful!
We could be buried until spring,
limbs tangled
under the snowy quilt.

One syllable older than language
can shock the snow awake,
recollecting its true nature:
to flow, to flood.

Listen: the brass bell fastened
to the neck of a sheep
has some other sheep’s tooth
for a clapper.
These noises we make
for each other & through each other,
mouth against throat,
broadcast our position
at every trembling step.

Cwm (pronounded “koom”) is a cirque.

Thought I’d try my hand at a love poem for once. Not being in any romantic entanglement actually makes it easier, I think. Hard to achieve the necessary aesthetic distance otherwise.

September 4, 2009 by Dave Bonta

International Rock Flipping Day 2009 set for September 20th

International Rock-Flipping Day is changing dates and coordinators this year. It’s going to be on Sunday, September 20th. Bev Wigney and I passed the baton to Susanna Anderson at Wanderin’ Weeta blog in British Columbia, who was kind enough to volunteer. See her announcement post for complete details.

Please direct all rock-flipping correspondence this year to Susanna: wanderinweeta [at] gmail [dot] com (email spelled out to foil the evil robot servants of the spam lords). Bev and I had a great time being IRFD coordinators the first two years, and we’re sorry we can’t continue,* but I’m sure Susanna will do a terrific job. Please help spread the word about the new date. Happy flipping!
__________

*In case anyone is interested in our lame excuses: With all that’s going on these days at qarrtsiluni and the other sites I manage or attempt to contribute to, my online time is already pretty much spoken for. And Bev is in even worse shape time-wise, having just sold and moved out of her house and being on the verge of a new “journey to the center.” We both do plan to get out on the 20th, though, and flip some rocks!

September 2, 2009 by Dave Bonta

Stock

By noon, the crickets are back to normal speed, but the honey in the jar retains its new-found stiffness. The cicada chorus swells & dwindles, a metallic surf, & the field hums with bees wallowing through goldenrod. On this coolest of summers, my house has been painted a blinding white, like the bed of a lake that vanished into the clouds, leaving only its salt. I look down: a carrion beetle scuttles over the portico bricks right up to my front door & goes all along the bottom looking for an entrance. Maybe it’s lost, I say to myself. You can’t put too much stock in insects.