Category: Nature/Ecology

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Next Exit: Xanadu

one must leave the garden
of earthly delights

where it belongs in a chest
or dresser drawer

the true Beulah is more ordinary
swaying on its stalk

lure and haven for a host
of nectar-seekers

blooming quick as thought
before the trees sprout new shadows

shaped like gaywings bellwort
mayflower windflower

thin as a spindle
in the fat of the land

or massive as an old red oak
encircled by bear corn

supplicants turned parasitic
must leave their own leaves behind

diminutive towers flowering
out of the ground

till the corollas lose
their erections

and the teeth of the calyx
turn brown and drop

what would you give up
for a life of ease

the garden of earthly delights
slithers on its belly

quieting the cries of nestlings
one by one

it lives as angels do
only in the moment of contact

upside-down and electric
from a thundercloud’s dark soil

a devastating epiphany
heartwood preserved in charcoal form

as the oak grows its hollow
for wilder life

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Out with the Old

Barely noticed below the riot of spring wildflowers, last year’s leaves are breaking down into a common duff. Towhees aren’t as noisy now as they rummage for roughage.

deer skull and spine
on the old skid road
stretching my legs

Even the once-waxy oak leaves have worn thin, though the tailoring is still sharp—a close fit to the planet, which I see caricatured in a freshly fallen oak apple gall, green and glistening, the remains of its hacked leaf sticking out like a hitchhiker’s thumb.

standing water—
a birch tree perches
atop each stump

It’s humid. As the air warms, a cloud of gnats gathers around my hat.

snap
of a flycatcher’s beak—
winter’s gone

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Green Man

river in November light between bare woods and mountain

a green fog of leaves
rises from the understory

in a corner of the cemetery
where a hint of winter lingers

as if the highest use of a hill
were to hold our toxic dead

watched over by the faceless blue
spacecraft of a water tower

because we know the aliens
would land here if anywhere

or possibly just hover like
a thought balloon in the comics

brooding over centuries
of loss and trauma

where Chief Logan is said to have delivered
his famous last oration

there runs not a drop of my blood
in the veins of any living creature

after we aliens murdered
his entire family

it’s the kind of town where a child
might vanish on her way to school

and the old folks don’t care
whether you’re black green or purple

who wouldn’t want to land here
it gets quiet at night

no one blinks when a new subdivision
appears in a corn field

or when the barbarian barberry
or knotweed muscles in

people keep to themselves
tend their patches of grass

some heat their homes
on nothing but moonlight

*

after watching the UFO documentary A Moment of Contact

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Beltane

and what if my photos lose
any center of interest
becoming pure tapestry

i want no subjects
i want the impossible world itself
without me in it

after a late hard frost
i want to stroke each velvety leafling
on the mountainside

nothing is realer right now
than this green
i get off my train of thought for it

for an enormous oak with tiny leaves
twirling on their twigs against the clouds
like larval dragons

as the wind turns rainy
as a dog’s tongue
and the green fades with the daylight

i count mountains to fall asleep
leaving room in my dreams
for their lost languages

before the Great Hill People
wiped out the People
of the Blackened Ridge Pole

and Scotsmen came from Ulster
enlarged the void with rifles
and whiskey made from maize

clearcutting and prospecting
shooting the cougars
trapping out the wolves

without whom an alien
far less palatable greenness
spreads over the land like mold

i have been battling it with both hands
pulling out rampant barberry
privet and autumn olive

stopping to listen to new warblers
still flying thousands of miles
just to breed here

that nasal buzz
of a black-throated green
or a black-throated blue

and my camera is only a phone
with so many missing contacts
i hold it up to the sky

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Fugue State

let’s pretend to be savage again
with wild temperature swings
and hundred-year floods
tooth and claw rentable by the hour

let’s pretend to be real
authentic and shelf-stable
as if today’s sunrise
were the same as yesterday’s

let’s pretend to believe again
bust out our green flags
follow along in spring’s hymnal
loving the absurd turns inward and out

let’s pretend love and hate are opposites
tell it to the stranger in the mirror
and wipe that knowing smirk
off our misinformed face

let’s pretend we’re wild again
nobody’s monitoring our movements
rounding us up for captive breeding
replacing our habitat with a new convenience store

let’s pretend there’s time still
for every purpose
find timelessness between the trees
who stand for everything

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Dispatch from a Warming Planet

an April morning turns torrid
it begins with a buzz

a rustle in the oak leaves
shed last fall

as a bumblebee emerges
spotless from the earth

below the damp bells
of huckleberry blossoms

and every dangling catkin
in the wind’s index

morels raise
their hitchhikers’ thumbs

each webbed with a maze
of forking paths

i find the remains of a list
in my back pocket

the washing machine has
erased every last item

and puzzled the paper up
like gray honeycomb

this is what happens when i try
to collect myself

better just to focus
on finding places

where i can step without crushing
fresh-leafed ephemera

a whiff of smoke from a forest fire
five miles away

i struggle up the hill in the heat
a black-and-white warbler wheezes

i find a spot of shade where
witch hazels have leafed out

sitting in gray among gray rocks
i’m invisible to a groundhog

who wanders past without
so much as a glance

soon i too resume sleep-
walking in the heat

my shoes turn
yellow with pollen

a bumblebee vanishes
into a vole tunnel

a mile down the ridge i find
a pile of owl feathers

just beginning to scatter
in the midday glare

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Four Nights on Earth

1

the evening sky pulses
like an organ of light and void

the planets aren’t up
to anything i tell myself

a weasel’s shrill cry
behind me in the meadow

i recall the seething darkness
of tadpoles in a shrinking puddle

and the predatory newt who watched
over them as they hatched

east- and west-bound freights
pass each other moaning

a satellite crosses the heavens
without so much as a twinkle

2

dawn sky
through skinny branches

a thin blade of moon
in its halo like a fish on a platter

a quiet trickle from the spring
gives way to guttural trucks

the open range of the night
is closing fast

any minute now the birds begin
their summoning spells

3

if the earth’s ache for rain
should become my own

let me suckle at the root
of the lightning tree

for seventeen years
like a cicada

thunder might become
an antidote to numbness

there may be a howl
that holds us all in its bowl

spring peepers will keep up
their transmissions

4

ground fog and glowworms
build and fade
below the milky way

meteors leave
the briefest of trails

on the horizon the blink
blink of a red-eye flight

i try to picture other skies
elsewhere in the galaxy

what exotic stars
what mysteries of lifelessness

and how many more lives
might i have i wonder

as these stars start to fade
and tires resume
their dull rounds

giving the road called i-99
its red breakfast

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Geo Logic

pausing for breath i gaze up
into blossoming red maples

from one of which a red-
tailed hawk lifts off

the wake-robins’ wine-dark
buds are loosening

gnats circle my head
baffled by my glasses

i can hear a waterthrush
up around the next bend

of the stream that carved
this whole masterpiece of a hollow

though you’d never guess
from the way it breaks

over every rock and log
like something fragile

i push my glasses back up
and resume pulling weeds

for my mother, Marcia Bonta

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The Way to the Ocean

the way to the ocean
goes through New Jersey

named for an island
where a king once kept his head

on the other side of the Atlantic
an inch and a half farther away each year

which sounds like a tall tale
a sailor might tell

if boardwalk barkers didn’t already
cover the waterfront

on the way to the ocean
circling vultures turn into gulls

fish crows
quack like ducks

a mockingbird riffs from the roof
of a manufactured home

in a manufactured village
right off U.S. Route 322

which has somehow caught up with me
after we parted in the mountains

i walk its broad shoulder
past brown fields and brownfield sites

it’s early spring so most green things
are aliens: privet ivy multiflora rose

aside from a few
prickly natives:

American holly Atlantic whitecedar
and the pines the pines

their high pitch where forest fires licked
what the locals call sugar sand

ducking into the woods
i find an old homeless camp

collapsed tent frame
discarded high-visibility coveralls

on the way to the ocean
is no way to live

to settle like fallen leaves
wherever the wind takes us

living on the road means
a groundhog oblivious to traffic

burrow hidden in a tangle
of Oriental bittersweet

or a burger place across the road
from a billboard for addiction recovery

a farmer on a backhoe
leading a small herd of goats

pray, hope & don’t worry
says a sign by someone’s mailbox

beyond which I find a faded
bouquet of artificial roses

hanging upright where i imagine
it had been flung from a car window

the right of the people to keep and bear arms
shall not be infringed says a billboard

across the highway from a weeping cherry
in full glorious bloom

i turn onto a smaller road
past a resort campground

lakes are easy to make here
where the Atlantic once beached

circling one of them on foot
i am accosted twice

by people wondering whether i’m lost
or am looking for someone

and neither is a question i quite
know how to answer

a woman embracing a bear of a man
rumbles past on a Harley

and off under the pines
all around a derelict trailer

i spot the bright green flags
of skunk cabbages

the way to the ocean
doesn’t wait for continental drift

though perhaps it could i think
standing on the beach at Ocean City

gazing out at the immensity
for a heartbeat or two

then down to my feet
at scallop shells

reminding me that any road
can become a route for pilgrimage

you can walk the boardwalk
out past the end of capitalism

lie down in the sand
and rust

because the true way to the ocean
must begin at the ocean

students running with a kite
a man watching a fishing line

a child who digs shallow holes
and lets them fill with sky

with gratitude to my cousin Heidi Myers Suydam for all her hospitality

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Time Travelers

how the hours have fallen
from their early days among monks

now they are uniform
modular
single-use

save for the odd poet or naturalist
taking minutes like medicine

for whom listening might be
the purest form of devotion

at the bottom of the hollow
two migrant waterthrushes

serenade the stream
its blended whiskery gurgles

just before it vanishes
into a culvert under the railroad

and a freight train’s
ground-shaking metal

i climb into the sun
of mourning cloaks

the pale edges of their wings
dazzle like blades

as they chase and battle
over an open patch of ground

crossed by the shadows
of slow vultures

i come to a clearing where all
the oaks have died

paradise
for a pair of bluebirds

whose blink-and-you-miss-it copulation
releases a torrent of song

it is their golden hour
round and endless

here they will ravel detritus
into a nest