Month: March 2012

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Thaw

Warmer days, light that fades later and later. Finally we can fling the windows open. The clasps grate and rasp, like throats gargling salt water first thing in the morning. Rooms crammed with more than winter’s fat; eaves with bits of leaf and twig, blinds lined with ledgers of dust. The drawers groan with socks and scarves, the pantry shelves with unopened cans of beans. I want to scrub all the corners, scour the tiles in the bathroom with bleach— even the stripes of grout between each one. I want a pot of yellow strawflowers, a bowl of blood-red tulips, nothing else but the mellow gleam of wood in the middle of the room. I read about ascetics and what they chose to renounce. Sometimes I think I want that. Sometimes I want to be both the mountains emerging from their heavy robes of ice and snow, and the streams they feed below, rushing and teeming with color and new life. Sometimes I want to be the clear unflavored envelope of agar, other times the small mouthful of sweet azuki bean entombed like a heart in the center.

 

In response to cold mountain (31).

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Wye Switches

At the back of a cupboard, I found a tightly-sealed plastic container on which I’d written “Spearmint 2001.” Would mint collected and dried more than a decade earlier still taste fresh? It would. I’m drinking mint tea with honey as I write.

If I was hoping for a Proustian madeliene experience, though, it didn’t happen. Mint is mint, regardless of whether it was gathered within (I think) weeks of 9/11. Still, it’s melancholy to sit outside and drink it on a cloudless day and think about all that’s happened since that cloudless morning in early September ten and a half years ago. I remember how lonely and isolated I felt in the weeks that followed, opposing an invasion that almost everyone else, even good liberals, supported. Everything could’ve been so different, maybe.

Just imagine if we’d waited for the Taliban government, then on friendly terms with the U.S. administration, to examine our evidence and extradite Bin Laden, rather than opting for a supposedly therapeutic orgy of violence. Imagine if we’d been allowed to have a real conversation about why we were so hated in the Middle East. Imagine if instead of war, torture and indefinite detentions, we’d opted for peace, forgiveness and support of true grassroots organizations throughout the Middle East — the Arab Spring might’ve come years earlier. Imagine if Americans didn’t insist on clinging to the romantic fantasy that problems can be solved through violence. Imagine if, as a certain book alleged, we could really solve problems by sitting down together and sharing cups of tea.

*

A couple of days ago, in the process of linking to Stanley Kunitz, I was reminded that he had been the U.S. poet laureate at the time. That seemed especially hard to believe — that it’s been so many years now, and that he’s been dead since 2006. He lived so long, it seemed impossible that we would ever be without his wise, often prophetic voice.

I have a very clear memory of driving home from somewhere with my hiking friend Lucy in March 2001 and hearing an interview with Kunitz come on the radio. I’m not sure where we walked that day, but I do remember where we were driving at the time: a place called Wye Switches in Duncansville, Pennsylvania. He read two poems, “The Layers” and “Day of Foreboding,” which reads in its entirety:

Great events are about to happen.
I have seen migratory birds
in unprecedented numbers
descend on the coastal plain,
picking the margins clean.
My bones are a family in their tent
huddled over a small fire
waiting for the uncertain signal
to resume the long march.

Unfortunately, NPR’s audio archive for that episode is in Real format, which most people won’t have the software to listen to anymore. But a more recent reading on NPR from 2005, in celebration of Kunitz’ 100th birthday, is even more wonderful. Take a listen to him reading “The Long Boat”:

Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn’t matter
which way was home;
as if he didn’t know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.

I think I’ll brew another cup of tea.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Dear shadow,

This entry is part 72 of 73 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2011-12

 

it is certain you’ll travel to what waits
ahead: not the intersection with its lights

already changing, not the fringe of rain-
spattered fields nor the road unbuckling

toward dusk. Even the lone truck you might hear
starting and stopping, engine running as if on

empty, will fade from sight. Just like
at the optometrist’s, when the technician

asks you to look through the viewfinder
and straight ahead at the red barn

with a silo and no stick weathervane. Then
she’ll blow a puff of air into your open

eyes, before sliding the window down.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Heart

This entry is part 17 of 29 in the series Conversari

 

Watch on Vimeo.

This almost belongs in the Manual series, but for the fact that I didn’t write it. The text, and the object to which it refers, came from the pen and knitting needles of Rachel Rawlins, and you can see both at twisted rib. While there, you can click on the conversari tag and browse her half of our on-going, inter-blog conversation in words and images, originating in more quotidian exchanges via email, IM, etc.: one of those sprawling conversations that just keeps sprouting new, sometimes grotesque branches and digressions, grows ever more firmly rooted, and seems as if it might go on forever.

I shot the footage of the garter snake ball yesterday morning, while rushing back and forth between the houses to bake bread. (A mention made it into the Morning Porch, whence, curiously, Luisa also derived the image of a heart.) I felt I had to make the film fairly abstract, since I already made a videopoem with more straight-forward footage of a garter snake mating ball two years ago. On that occasion, I also uploaded an 8-minute video of the orgy. This time, I grabbed my regular camera and managed to get one half-decent still photo:

garter snake mating ball

It was a thing of beauty, albeit hair-raising as always. Incidentally, I’ve probably said this before, but our robust garter snake population in Plummer’s Hollow is, I think, a direct consequence of our decision to stop mowing the lawns. If you like reptiles and amphibians and want to encourage them around your own home, the best thing you can do is transition to a less-managed landscape. Call it Daoist gardening if you like.

Garter snakes usually form mating balls immediately after emergence from hibernation in spring, but sometimes they mate in the fall, too. The great American poet Stanley Kunitz wrote about encountering one such coupling — “that wild braid” — in his iconic poem “The Snakes of September.”

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Exchange

This entry is part 16 of 29 in the series Conversari

 

It’s because of money that we know time, too, comes in measurable units. In the same coin you can have suns & seeds of millet, atoms in their molecules not exactly dancing, footprints of giant millipedes—a small universe designed to frustrate anyone with arithmomania. You and I might find ourselves on opposite sides, a Janus. Every time you shake your head, mine nods, & when I rock with laughter it makes you seasick. Less like reflection, then, than echoing, this give-&-take, because with each pass there’s a little less. Modularity had something to do with it once, but now the coin is its own metal. The decorative columns might as well go back to being trunks; soon our clearing will be nothing but a stifled yawn.

See the response by Rachel Rawlins, “Fruit.”

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Erasure

Tonight, after reading the story of Rauschenberg’s erasure
of one of Willem de Kooning’s drawings— something

I would miss, the painter declared; something very hard
to erase— I go out on the deck to snap another picture

of Venus and Jupiter coming closer together in the sky.
Intensely bright, two orbs outshining faint amber spilled

from street lamps obscured by leaves. What remains after
the marks are erased? Not nothing, say the physicists.

Not nothing, but poetry— says the artist. And I pause
for a moment, trying to look harder into the corridor

of darkness, knowing that everywhere I go, I have
no idea how much I am seeing. You, for instance, absent

from my side but now not so far away in the same
field of graphite: you could be anywhere. You could be

that outline scissored against the pines, a faint
stroke of orange blossom lofting above these fences.

You could be the sound of a shutter, the blank
accordion surface of blinds turned down for the night.

 

In response to Two Ways to Think about Nothing.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

How have I failed to notice until now

This entry is part 69 of 73 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Winter 2011-12

 

that the earnest-sounding clerk calling
all shoppers to gather round his station
between the produce and meat sections
at the price club, is doing his demo
of Ginsu knives by slicing through
not a steak, but the metal head of a claw
hammer? There’s a small collective gasp
when the same steel blade that severs
the claws which fall like little Toblerone
shapes on the chopping block, swiftly renders
a tomato into paper-thin circles. While this
is not exactly the state of “disruptive wonder”
which the TED lecturer was talking about in that
viral video, in which she describes how her passion
to find “the hidden talents of everyday things”
led to the paper record player-invitation she made
for friends getting married— still, the suddenly
Ginsu-happy crowd might see in the photophoric
gleam of new steel bonded to textured no-slip
polypropylene or wood handles, a few other
things they might not have paid attention to
before: the tiniest flinch in a cut of brittle
green nori wrapped around a savory mouthful
of rice; the even perfection of carrot stars
and radish wheels; the elegance of cucumber
matchsticks, pale and smooth as jade.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.