Epigrams and Conundrums – Page 11

July 2, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Washing the lettuce

It is said that Plato once came upon Diogenes the Kynic washing wild lettuce for his supper. “If you had paid court to Dionysius, you wouldn’t be reduced to washing lettuce,” said the philosopher. “If you had learned to wash lettuce, you wouldn’t have had to pay court to Dionysius,” replied the Kynic.

Diogenes believed in direct, unconventional responses rather in the manner of a Tang Dynasty Zen master. Once, when someone tried to convince him of the merits of Plato’s philosophy of Ideas, he squatted down and took a shit.

Once, on a sea voyage, Diogenes was captured by pirates who took him to Crete and put him on sale at the slave market. The auctioneer asked him whether he had any marketable talents. “Yes,” he said, “I excel at giving orders. Sell me to someone who needs a master.” It is said that a man called Xeniades was so impressed by this, he purchased him to tutor his children. Diogenes was soon in control of the man’s entire household. Years later, living in his tub, he used to deride rulers as slaves to their people.

Someone once asked Diogenes why it is that people give alms to beggars, who do little to deserve it, and not to philosophers, who perform such valuable services for all humanity. “Everyone expects that they themselves might someday be reduced to beggary,” Diogenes observed, “but no one ever expects to be reduced to philosophizing.”

June 29, 2005September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

A brief gallery of hideous things

Live out your life in a lonesome hollow. The unattainable horizon comes to crush you all the same.

The real pity – says the benignly neglectful gardener – is that the flea beetles are too busy ever to stop and admire their handiwork.

Slime molds always remind me of the late Emperor of Japan. Imprisoned by protocol, worshipped as a living god, Hirohito made an infinitesimal progress around the grounds of the Chrysanthemum Palace, magnifying glass at the ready for these otherworldly creatures that evade every category humans can invent.

Like the proverbial army that travels on its stomach, the bulldozer chews up the earth with its caterpillar feet.

Some merely stoop to conquer. Japanese stilt grass falls all over itself.

Put out to pasture, the rotting muscle car gives its last joy ride to a multiflora rose.

The sun oozes into view. Seven-thirty and already I’m bathed in sweat. On a brief walk around the field, I spot my father hanging out laundry. He’s whistling “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” as he pins up the underwear.

UPDATE: My father insists that he was in fact whistling “God Save the Queen.” Could’ve fooled me.

June 16, 2005December 8, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Full of pith

I am reading “Nineteen poems” by W. S. Merwin in the May/June 2004 issue of American Poetry Review, and arguing with nearly every one.

Maybe I shouldn’t confess that I read some periodicals a year after their date of publication. You might get the idea that I am more up-to-date than I am.

This morning I inaugurate a new pocket notebook by jotting down some would-be pithy observations, mainly because I’m too tired for sustained thinking. Sleeplessness started with a chill in my feet around 3:30 that became an ache in my left shoulder blade at 4:00 and then, when I tried to get out of bed at 4:45, turned into a stabbing pain in my right calf. Now I am fully awake and feel only the usual compulsion to line words up and drill some sense into them.

Every mirror I’ve ever looked into, I’ve seen the same goddamn thing. You’d think just once there’d be something different in there.

If the universe were as unchanging and eternal as each of us in moments of weakness have probably longed for it to be, wouldn’t we be blinded by the light from all those billions of stars? If there were no death, wouldn’t the heat from all that living turn us to ash?

“Beyond belief” always sounds like an interesting place to visit. I picture some island nation on the equator: warm and pleasant year-round, with no seasons to speak of; hospitable natives; most of the economy derived in one way or another from the simple fact of being so remote from any other inhabited spot. Once every few generations, a cyclone comes along and flattens everything.

I confess that I have never completely reconciled myself to cause and effect. I’m kind of superstitious that way. If I’m not careful, I find myself picturing each action as if it occurred in a literal void, that abhorrent vacuum. For all the years I’ve gardened, I still plant seeds expecting nothing to come of it. When it does, I think, “But maybe this would’ve happened anyway.”

I am equally bored with the light and with the darkness. “There’s nothing to see here, folks. Move along!”

A thought experiment: Convene a meeting of the most creative scientists from every field and ask them to assume complete lack of uniformity. Describe the universe using qualities only. Collaborate on all conclusions. Everyone gets a veto.

I imagine this would be exactly like a conclave of poets, except for the “collaborate” part. And probably the writing would be more precise, more carefully thought-through.

An atheist, I suppose, is someone who can’t get over being appalled by the fact that the object(s) of desire are empty, bear no relationship to anything in the so-called real world.

Augustine was wrong: a beginning of time is no beginning. To begin always means to stop, right in the middle of things, and reset the counter.

In the beginning was the verb. And the verb was with child. And the umbilical cord was a worldwide web, full of mater and matter not yet differentiated into useful information versus solid waste.

The headline says: “Homing In On A Receptor For The Fifth Taste.” But does the tongue receive, or produce?

Out of all the vast numbers of organic compounds, we are only equipped to detect five, basic kinds. Luckily, Ev*lution has given us a direct pipeline between nose and mouth. And the nose is completely profligate and believes in everything.

Ah, tongue! Little comforter for a damp bed where only lies ever manage to sleep.

June 15, 2005February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

What happens

Coyote says: We shit, as we dream – alone.

Turkey says: We shit in an old chaos of the sun.

Deer says: Not love thy shit, nor hate; but what thou shit’st, shit well.

Gray fox says: Only connect! Shit in fragments no longer.

Horse says: No other penalty than to shit in desire without hope, a fate appropriate to noble souls with a clear vision of shit.

Bear says: I went to the woods to shit deliberately.
___________

With apologies to Conrad, Stevens, Milton, E. M. Forster, Santayana and Thoreau.

June 14, 2005September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Self help

Dear Emily, I was glad to hear about your new incarnation as an advice columnist. I’m confused.

If I turned over a new leaf, would I stay just as green?

If I look on the bright side, won’t I need shades?

If I just do it, can I get out of having to think?

If I’m to be neither a borrower nor a lender, shouldn’t I in good conscience cease to breathe?

If I gave a hundred and ten percent, could I get it all back in deductions?

If I follow someone else’s advice to reinvent myself, who owns the intellectual property rights?

If I’m learning to express my sexuality, and I accidentally get in touch with my inner child, does that make me a pedophile?

If I prioritize personal growth, can I write off my blighted urban core?

If I seize the day, can I still get a good night’s sleep?

If I cast my bread upon the waters, am I free to piss in the wind?

If I could truly “be here, now,” would I forget how to curse?

If I let the scales fall from my eyes, how would I see my way in a world of snakes?

Most of all, I wonder: If I help myself, can I still expect a second helping?

Any light you could shed on these matters would be much appreciated. Sign me…

Differently Clued in Pennsylvania
__________

Thanks to Abdul-Walid for forwarding the link.

April 19, 2005September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Confessions of a semi-professional misanthrope

1. I would’ve liked to be a charlatan, to cure the incurable despite myself & the spooky footlights that would’ve come & gone, turning my cheeks into sudden caverns. I could’ve learned how to capture & breed the small mice of fear. I’d have had a riverboat & floated upstream on the tide, under the sycamores. I’d have told each client to be patient while I made a careful, horizontal incision all around the skin of a pomegranate, then eased it open, revealing who knows what mucilaginous gossip to feed an infinitely malleable appetite for lies.

2. The woman at the cookout says things that no one believes, not even us strangers. She tells us she’s already eaten. She says she & her husband are leaving the United States for some place civilized, some place where more of the people think the way they do, keep their needs within bounds. The campfire makes her young husband’s eyebrows dance like an elf’s; even his smile is eldritch. Her own smile is extremely brief, like an involuntary twitch she has labored to suppress. We talk about music & the pleasures of silence. “I have to have something on all the time when I’m alone,” she says softly. “I guess I don’t like my own company very much.” The night grows cool & the firewood quickly runs out. Everyone gets up to leave, bowing to each other’s silhouette in the darkness & expressing mutual gratitude, warm regards.

3. Call it natural sound if you want, I said, or call it silence: more & more, this is the soundtrack of pleasure for me. I hear music whether I want to or not. Thoughts rise to the surface & burst, pretty little bubbles. I stand outside in the middle of the driveway until my freshly barbered head grows cold. Above, the usual glitter. I try to imagine all the busy little lives going on underground, in the forest litter or in hollow trees. I go back in my house & shut both doors as quietly as I can. If this is loneliness, my friends, it tastes delicious!

4. I do enjoy the company of my fellow misanthropes – preferably one at a time. And on rare occasions when I’m drunk I play loud music to cancel out the unaccustomed roar inside my head.

5. I am still haunted by stories of those child soldiers forced at gunpoint to execute their own parents, then fed a steady diet of drugs & made to rape other children until acts of violence came to seem as natural & urgent as eating, or voiding the bowels. Their leader was a portly, ebullient man who taught them how to cut off the hands of villagers without killing them. At first, the idea was to prevent them from voting or defending themselves, but the children took to it with a special relish – and who am I, said Papa Sankoh, to deny them their pay? From hands they branched out to feet, ears, lips – all of the body’s most delicate instruments. If one cannot go to war against love itself, surely this was the next best thing.

6. Horror movies bore me. They’re like elaborate practical jokes we play upon ourselves. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out – flaccid penises that suck rather than spurt, vaginas with teeth. Big deal. I’d rather hear about the woman who married a bear, or why coyote’s eyes are yellow. Tell me about the time a snake almost swallowed the sun.

7. The brown tree snake in Guam. Kudzu in the American South. Nightcrawlers in the North Woods. These are only the most catastrophic of our slithering doppelgangers. Upon thy belly… Dust thou shalt eat… I will put enmity between thee and the woman. Who are we to deny the Lord His pay?

8. Beetles by the hundreds & the thousands, coming out of the walls. They crawl everywhere. I brush them from my beard, the back of my neck. Sometimes they bite. By the end of the winter, the house reeks of them. In my dreams, the floor heaves & cracks with their huddled masses. In their native Asia they winter in white cliffs; here, a white house or barn draws them like a beacon. Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home! But they are far more than just a nuisance. Some entomologists believe that dozens of ladybird beetle species native to the eastern United States have already gone extinct, unable to compete – their numbers too low, their habits insufficiently aggressive.

9. We have met the enemy, and he is us. We have. He is. This is authentic horror, the only kind that will matter in the end.

10. Call me Ishmael, then. I am a charlatan; how could it be otherwise? But better that, I say, than the unconscious & unconscionable sorcery of markets & bosses. Follow me, & we will both be lost – I promise. Salvation exists in the present or it doesn’t exist. We will thirst forever.

April 13, 2005September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Death: letters

I found this child’s glove on the lawn after the snow melted. I’m not sure where it came from. We don’t get trick-or-treaters here.

A is for Absence, which we are unable to imagine for ourselves but all too ready to visit upon the world.

B is for Bones, which grow and break and knit themselves back together, but mercifully do not feel.

C is for Carcass, or Carcase – in either case, the body turned into burden, a dead weight.

D is (of course) for Death, which we can only understand by reference to life, which we cannot understand at all: thus, it is a mystery of the second degree and not the first.

E is for Eater, or Earth, which rhymes with mirth for no particular reason.

F is for Fate, curator of retrospectives.

G is for God or Gangster, Google or Ganges, Gog or Gag.

H is for Hell, which used not to be so Hot before the Christians conquered it and turned it into a penal colony.

I is for Iconoclast – the most precise job description for Death that I can think of.

J is for Jack and Jill, who went looking for water in high places rather than in low, and suffered the consequences.

I almost stepped on this doe skeleton down in the marshy corner of the field yesterday – probably a winter kill from 2004.

K is for Knack, the one thing we can neither take with us nor pass on, as Zhuangzi noted.

L is for Languor, which seeks to escape but manages merely to omit.

M is for Motive, without which Murder is truly a Mystery.

N is for Narcotic: henbane, thornapple, belladonna – plants that remind us that death is a form of ecstasy.

O is for something Other than what you think.

P is for Post or Pillory, the original way to spread news both Public and Personal, where all letters arrive marked current resident.

Q is for Query, a kind of minimized Question that permits a sleight-of-hand substitution of words for bodily presence.

R is for Return, a logical impossibility (see Heraclitus).

Also yesterday, I found this dead fish in the woods. There are no live fish on the mountain. All I can figure is that a passing osprey dropped it.

S is for Snake – or rather, S is a snake, whose hiss must be one of our favorite sounds. It makes the blood race in our snaky veins.

T is for Test, a Terror-ridden, Terrible justification for child sacrifice, both in Abraham’s time and in our own.

U is for Uncle, the ugly one that children make other children call them, on pain of death.

V is for Vault, a place to store money or bones.

W is for Want and for Worm: the price of admission, regardless of the show.

X is for X – anything you want (see W). It signals openness and cancellation both, a friendly kiss and a pornographic rating.

Y is for Youth, when immortality and tragedy both seem possible.

Z is for Zest, the merest smidgen of which is proof against Zero.

April 12, 2005September 23, 2012 by Dave Bonta

Life: sentences

1.
She had stood too still for too long in the clothing store window, and found that now she couldn’t even shift her weight to the other foot without frightening the customers, who weren’t necessarily paying close attention but who did know the difference between art, which is immobile, and its pale imitators that insist on moving, bulging, sagging, wrinkling – looking for life, so to speak, in all the wrong places.

2.
It was always the same April that came around to raise up the same clumps of daffodils and pry their petals open for the same refreshing breeze, I figured the old dog statue might be thinking, ignoring for a moment the new hairline cracks the winter left behind and the fresh flakes of paint furring his haunches.

3.
An amazing coincidence, really, she said, that in Spanish el bis, the encore, and Elvis, the singer, are homonyms – not to mention that in English you can rearrange the letters of the King’s name to get lives, Levis – which he sometimes wore – and evils, which he battled in his own bloated way, enthroned on a golden crapper.

4.
After a while, even sunflowers grow tired of craning their necks, and that entire motley field ended up with heads bowed, facing the dark and unremarkable earth, so that they did not see the bear come out of the woods to eat and smash and roll on his back for delight among the stripped stalks.

5.
With the clumsy puzzlement of a minor prophet carrying two smooth pebbles in his mouth, he was unable to explain those spectacular failures of the eyebrow to rise in the east and the toenail to metamorphose into something with an insatiable hunger for tunnels.

6.
But what faith hasn’t taken its cues from the living body, I wonder, thinking of bell tower and stupa, grotto and lingam, remembering labyrinths engraved on the pads of fingers, twin doves in the thighs, the spine’s vertiginous ladder: smiling now at the scandal of it, how all roads led to a rose tattoo just below the navel, that stingless bee.

7.
A herd of goats stood in the branches of a thorn tree as if to take the place of leaves they had eaten, the shade they had banished to their tough stomachs, the perpendicular light that must have tasted a bit like dust blown from the cover of a book too large to fit in the shelf with all the paperbacks, a book of photos meant to be paged through and nibbled at rather than actually read – a book specifically designed for guests such as I am now, sipping my coffee, stroking the hairs on my chin.

8.
What all these hip bohemian kids are too young to remember, he told us, is the way one used to see black shawls and dresses in every square, black in the long coats of the police, black ties and belts and suspenders on men in ordinary restaurants, black rooks and lines of ants that came to pick everything clean and carry off the sugar, black even in your one maybe glimpse of garters against, you know – the very word, let alone the stark sight, remained off-limits still, I think, for two or three years beyond the death of that son of a whore, the president-for-life.

April 7, 2005 by Dave Bonta

Problems with “if”

Show your work.

If a human being dies in the city, and there’s no tree to absorb its dying breath, does it make a death rattle?

If love is blind, why don’t blind people wear see-through lingerie?

If you can keep your head in brine for a fortnight, will it stop the voices?

If they toss a coin and neither team calls it, does everyone get to go home?

If you love somebody, set them free. If they don’t come back, set yourself free. If you don’t come back, can I still crash in your garage?

If wishes were horses, could dead wishes be rendered into enough glue to stick all the broken dreams back together?

If every dog has its day and every day is the first day of the rest of your life, does this necessarily imply that you should spend the rest of your life sniffing crotches?

If a pound of feathers weighs as much as a pound of lead, and if clocks had feather pendulums, would time still fly?

If at first you don’t succeed, and you know that your chance of success on each subsequent try remains completely unaffected by that outcome, wouldn’t it make more sense to spend your last lucky penny on a gumdrop?

If a module met a unit coming through the rye, would anyone sing about it?

If I had a nickel for every time someone asked me for a quarter, how many quarters would I have to give away before I had enough money to endow a chair in Applied Autopoiesis?

If homeless mimes inhabit invisible rooms, how do you know where to wipe your feet?

If you never had second thoughts, and you were traveling at the speed of light, how would you be able to tell yourself apart from God?

If I had my way, to whom would I give it back when I was done with it?

If there really were One True Way, how many turning lanes would it have to have?

If a hundred monkeys typed at a hundred typewriters, and only one key worked on each typewriter, how long would it take them to use up all the paper?

If you’re lost in the rain in Juarez, and it’s not a Bob Dylan song, either, and the raindrops keep falling farther apart, but you decide to walk more quickly, do you still get just as wet?

If x=2, doesn’t that take all the fun out of it?

If you had one match, a cup of water, a mirror, a pair of chopsticks and a stopwatch, how long would it take it you to think up a conundrum that involved all these things and nothing extra?

If two cannibals fell in love with the same woman, couldn’t they just eat each other’s heart out?

If carrots help you see in the dark, do eggplants help you see underwater?

If Fate and Opportunity both knocked on wood at the same time, what would it sound like from underneath the table?

If I were you, wouldn’t that be weird?

March 28, 2005February 18, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Two legs at noon: new poem-like things

I want to give myself back to myself, I thought, sitting on the porch at dawn & watching the dark details slowly filling in between the scattered patches of white, which, among all possible fallen things, I suspect will once again turn out to be nothing but snow.

My first published poem in years & they fucked it up, printing double spaces between the lines. And they’re short lines, too. I’m amazed by how well they manage to bear the burden of their isolation. My words have never seemed so measured before. They pick their way over the page on herons’ feet.

Along with What do you do? & Where are you from? I would like to ask each new acquaintance, What do you grieve for? Because I have this hunch that everyone clutches a portion of the self-same grief. We give it endearing names, as culture & circumstance may dictate. Our male or female nipples ache to give it suck.

I remember sitting under, inside, encircled – surrounded by her, as ripples in a pond surround a water-strider, rowing the skinny boat of his fish-bait body to & fro.

After a day spent hunched over a keypad, to stand outside in my slippers looking at the moon seems wholly fatuous. How does taking this in for a few minutes make up for everything I have failed to witness? The calendar on my computer tells me to expect a full moon, so I wait for the clouds to thin & the trees to grow shadows as they should. In the space of ten minutes, my front yard expands to an enormous size. The calendar on my computer says it’s Good Friday. Resist the urge to pray long enough & the sweetness will rise & spread to your outermost branches.

Easter Sunday: thick fog, dark shapes of redwing blackbirds in the walnut trees, all calling at once. They drown out the song sparrows, the robins, even the creek. It’s the auditory equivalent of a rolling boil: the overtones rise & burst, rise & burst.

Whichever direction I walk, the fog keeps its distance. It reminds me of driving in certain parts of the Midwest where trees are spread just thickly enough to make one swear there must be a forest on the horizon. Here, the woods are never far. A pileated woodpecker drums & cackles. This corner of the field where plow & mower have been absent the longest has the highest concentration of ant mounds & small mammal burrows. Leave land alone long enough & it will grow – not in acreage, perhaps, but certainly in surface area. Its dreams are no longer yours. They multiply, re-drawing the horizon. Like a girl turning into her own woman – a rarer thing than it should be in this over-farmed world.

The snow lingers on old logging roads & on the weather side of abandoned plow lines. On a clear day in the middle of March one can see such scars on wooded hillsides from miles away. But today we’re socked in with fog; I keep my eyes on the damp leaves beneath my feet. Here & there I can make out drag trails from last fall’s hunting season, tufts of white hair from a deer’s belly.

Coyote shit always lies parallel to the direction of the trail. Here’s a case in point: three hairy gray turds side by side, half caterpillar, half pupa. Remember this if you’re ever lost in the woods. As much as its priorities may differ from ours, a coyote can be trusted to follow a straight line for miles.

Orange on the ridgetop where a porcupine has chewed the bark off a fallen red oak tree, limb & branch. Orange in the Far Field where my father always mows the same path with his tractor, a stripe of broom sedge through the gray-brown mess of old goldenrod.

Fifty feet off the trail, a tree drops a limb just to see if I’m paying attention. I am now.

Winter-bleached leaves on a stand of beech saplings hang tip-down, curled like funnels, holding moisture for no good reason I can think of. When the wind starts up they drop it all at once. I hear the patter from around the bend & picture things running – yet another harmless conclave broken up by the approach of a human being, two legs at noon.