a morning-fresh aroma
from the compost
steaming in the cool air
i descend the mountain
just so i can climb it
yet again
through fog
as soft as the moss
acorns clattering down
the sun’s already out
in the valley for
the annual farm show
and above the gap
the first broad-winged
hawks of the day
spiral high around
a column of rising heat
then hurtle south
while a long rumbling
line of tractors
snakes through the fields
they used to say
rogation was good
for the crops
even bullshit walks
on six legs
bit by bit into the earth
***
Another day, another poem. Thanks to my brother Mark for the bird info and the Sinking Valley Facebook page for the farm show info. Rogation was/is a Catholic ritual with parallels in folk religions around the world, a form of annual pilgrimage in which a priest leads a procession of local residents in a circuit of the fields.
If I ran a movie review site, nothing would get more than one star. Movies would compete for fractions of a star.
Times are lean. We could run out of stars.
No one could afford to live under such a dark sky. They’d go mad with loneliness.
I saw another fireball the other night. Spend time under the stars and you see things: fish, a bull, a hunter, you name it. It’s so liberating to realize thanks to modern astronomy that the universe isn’t about us.
That said, there is a gas giant in my guest bedroom. My older brother can’t help his stature or intestinal difficulties. In his religion, everyone gets their own universe someday—a classic Ponzi scheme if you ask me. But what if it’s true?
I think the opposite is more likely the case: everything is drifting farther and farther apart, into an ever emptier void. You can already see it happening. People have that distance in their eyes.
the high inhuman
shriek of a dying rabbit
4th quarter moon
Finally got a good look at the pair of red-breasted nuthatches who’ve been hanging out in the spruce grove all year, according to my younger brother, and presumably nesting. Like the red squirrel i got a good look at yesterday, they were right near Dad’s grave. The spot is beginning to feel a bit magical, I have to say. Currently there’s a bit of fresh rain-water in the reflecting rock. I’m sitting on the bench listening to the stuttering calls of Linne’s cicadas, “a steady pulsating rattle sounding like a saltshaker” as the Songs of Insects website puts it. They outnumber dog-day cicadas now, of which I’m hearing just two—that buzz-saw whine. I’m also hearing what sound like falling acorns, a very hopeful sign.
***
In my poetry i want to write about nature without breathlessness. Don’t know whether i always succeed. Sharing new poetry on social media is an essential part of my probably Quixotic quest to normalize talking about wildflower sightings and wildlife encounters in the same way people post about the latest books or movies they’ve consumed.
I suppose in time I’ll end up creating a personal iconography of favourite species and other natural phenomena, licensed by the ubiquity of the smart phone and modern search engines—hardly any reference is too obscure anymore. For all that the internet has diminished attention spans, it does still expand access to layers of context that previously would’ve escaped all but the most knowledgeable of readers.
***
Successful ideologies are those that promise more than they can deliver. That way their adherents are never forced to answer for their beliefs. Evangelical conservatism may soon be dead as a political force because its adherents actually achieved one of their main goals, and everyone else is horrified.
***
Somewhere in the world right now a 90-pound weakling is sitting beside a hotel pool writing an epic novel and a 300-pound man in a tiny basement apartment is sweating over a haiku.
Realizing that one of the things I really like about Facebook and Instagram is the mundanity of much of the content. As far outside the mainstream as I am in how I occupy my time and what I like to read and think about, it’s useful to be reminded of normal things that people do, such as attend sporting events, cook on backyard grills, dance to music that nobody loves but almost everyone can tolerate, go on family vacations, etc. Especially at this point in my life, when I know that everyone else is just winging it, too, and that some of the most organized-seeming people are also the most terrified. (And considering the state of the world, if you’re not terrified, I don’t know what to tell you.)
Normality seems precious, now. Many actively debate its existence. I want to commit as much as of it as possible to memory. What we were like. How beautiful the planet still was.
***
mosquito wading
through my arm hair
her caress
stump water
a jake-braking truck’s
thunderous stutter
roadside diner
a vulture walks the last
few feet
stick insect
the wings you can’t grow
would be so green
mossy log
an old lightning strike’s
glossy char
***
How many times can an axis mundi be destroyed before the concept of the sacred becomes completely nonsensical? In the book of death all will be unwritten, but in the name of Life. Those who pray for the end of time and champion the destruction of the planet claim to speak for the unborn. For whom do you claim to speak?
I used to love watching Londoners watch the moonrise. At such times, a metropolis can feel like a village; strangers may actually find themselves having spontaneous conversations in one of the most uptight places on earth. The famous views become even more instagrammable: Let no one drink alone with the moon ever again! And the dogs running off-lead in the park, rolling ecstatically in the grass wherever a vixen had sprayed her scent.
open moon—
someone’s fingertip making
a wine glass sing
***
lyrics for an imaginary pop song
eyes on
her wing bones
hot tattoo summer
the voyeur finds
his gaze thwarted
by skin turned screen
close your eyes
and see more
with augmented reality
pay no attention
to the smell of smoke
behind the curtain
***
Ridgetop cellar hole for a collier’s hut. Two hundred years ago, this mountain was a smoking ruin.
An oak that started growing about that time.
Another oak that started growing about that time. Not too long ago, it seemed sturdy enough to get married under. Sic transit gloria mundi.
The charcoal fed the forge in the gap; the forgeman might’ve seen the mountain before it was entirely denuded. It was he and his family who settled it when clearcutting made it affordable. I suspect it had been a place of wet meadows and rhododendron thickets where forge workers liked to go on picnics, gather ginseng and sassafras, go hunting, etc.—a backyard wilderness even as devastated as it was.
***
A click beetle lands in my lap and seems unable to escape, given its strategy of trying to, I guess, freak predators out by snapping its body several inches in the air—and landing right back in the same spot. I take pity on it after six or seven clicks and give it a flick.
Whippoorwill, crickets, an occasional katydid. The moon isn’t due up for… a while. As for me, I’m going down to the house and up to bed.
My interior monologue: I don’t get why people still need mythic archetypes. Are we really so shallow?
Five minutes later: Let’s be honest, you’re still just a Moomintroll who longs to be Snufkin.
And that felt like a pretty solid insight, you know?
The moral of the story: Be sure to expose your children to the Moomin books—they’re pretty great.
There’s much more I could say on all of this but I’m currently (evening of June 28) chasing the sunset up a steep hillside. Which is absolutely not a metaphor for anything.
*
I understand the need for sacred theatre, i.e. ritual, around major life events—especially death, when the survivors are the most earnest in their need to behave as if a truer but less tangible reality exists in which total annihilation can be overcome or evaded somehow.
*
hot tub
laid bare in the woods
a junkie’s pale face
My interior monologue is heavily laced with sarcasm. I suppose that’s a Gen X thing. (Yes, of course you do. That’s the kind of sophisticated analysis you’re known for.)
Perfectly healthy, I’m sure.
***
“If everyone just thought like me, the world would be a better place” is a hallmark of both imperialism and fanaticism — in fact, they summon each other up, I think.
This is not idle philosophical speculation. Most left-wing revolutions turn repressive because fundamentally the revolutionaries are either too fanatical to accept that there will always be dissent, or too callous to care.
***
The forest is full of mourning cloak butterflies with pristine-looking wings: the new generation has just turned into adults. They will likely be aestivating soon, but in the meantime they’re defending territories in the woods.
I watched two mourning cloaks battling for several minutes on the side of an oak this afternoon. Since tree sap is their main source of food, perhaps this tree is especially good tasting. They used front and middle feet to bat at each other; mouthparts didn’t seem to be involved, and wings only a little. Here’s a brief video of the very end of the fight:
Bushwhacking through a Pennsylvania state forest, it’s impossible to stay lost for long. My first sign that a road was near, this morning, was a hunting camp privy. As is so often the case.
At one scenic overlook, a memorial to someone who leapt to his death. I actually remember this. I was a Penn State undergrad at the time.
Someone had spray-painted “no fear” on the retaining wall-like structure:
*
I remember my parents pointing out a “lovers’ leap” place on some family trip when I was a little kid, and how baffled I was. If romance made people jump to their deaths, it struck me as something best avoided.
*
Some trails are notional—made through bushwhacking.
Some trails are roads.
Some trails are the spines of mountains.
And some Snufkins go for a wander primarily to get a new perspective on where they live.
In American poetry as in our ordinary discourse, a kind of positivism reigns supreme, using language to expose, explore, and extract meaning. We bring this mentality to haiku in English and are thwarted, because in Japanese culture, language is considered to be such an inadequate vessel for conveying true thoughts/feelings that what isn’t said becomes at least as important as what is. (This is the point at which my own attempt to master Japanese faltered, as a young man in love with a certain style of discursive conversation. What’s the point of learning a language if you can never use it for robust arguments about ideas? I said to myself then.)
Haiku with its wealth of off-the-shelf natural imagery (kigo) represents an attempt to enlarge the overall cultural vocabulary for human feelings, which are considered much more recondite than most WYSIWYG Americans tend to admit. Suggestion and concision in haiku, tanka, etc., more than just arbitrary restrictions intended to spur inventiveness, represent openings for interpretive possibilities that require sensitivity and creativity to parse. So for American poets the challenge becomes “tell me X without telling me X”—a currently popular online meme formula. But rather than jokey photos, we work with two images or observations, a main one and a subsidiary one, joined by a semantic break in an almost kintsugi kind of way, mindful of the gap itself. According to the aesthetic values of Edo-period Japan, which still hold sway in traditional arts and crafts, in kintsugi “such ‘ugliness’ was considered inspirational and Zen-like, as it connoted beauty in broken things.” This wabi/sabi aesthetic finds parallels in a number of countercultural currents in the West, from Medieval monasticism and the whole Christian embrace of poverty and brokenness to the disruptive force of Eliot’s The Wasteland, and provides I believe the most reliable bridge between two otherwise quite different understandings of the limits and purpose of language..
I’d figured it would take 10 million years so this almost qualifies as good news to my bleak way of thinking https://t.co/oBaRM2YqQH
There have been five upheavals over the past 450 million years when the environment on our planet has changed so dramatically that the majority of Earth’s plant and animal species became extinct. After each mass extinction, evolution has slowly filled in the gaps with new species.
The sixth mass extinction is happening now, but this time the extinctions are not being caused by natural disasters; they are the work of humans. A team of researchers from Aarhus University and the University of Gothenburg has calculated that the extinctions are moving too rapidly for evolution to keep up.
If mammals diversify at their normal rates, it will still take them 5-7 million years to restore biodiversity to its level before modern humans evolved, and 3-5 million years just to reach current biodiversity levels, according to the analysis, which was published recently in the prestigious scientific journal, PNAS.
The brokenness of the world is far more urgent than it was in Basho’s day. If we don’t mind the gaps, they will soon swallow us and all our art and culture, because a world without beasts, a world where the immense creative power and resilience of nature are hidden for millions of years, is a world without poetry.
dancing flames— a ruby-throated hummingbird here and gone
There’s one wood thrush here with a markedly less pleasant song than the others. It’s sort of flat and minor key, and while still musically more interesting than most songbirds, simply does not meet the high standard set for wood thrushes. This thrush’s performances feel perfunctory, even dialed in. Two and a half stars.
I wonder whether I’d be more concerned about my legacy as a poet if I had planted fewer trees?
What happens when we stop thinking of evolution as a ladder leading to us, which it most definitely is not, and start thinking about it instead as the story of our ancestors? What Darwin called the Descent of Man. Because that’s what we are: descendants. The paramecium is my brother! Or my ten-thousandth cousin a million times removed.
Paramecium or Paramoecium is a genus of unicellular ciliated protozoa. They are characterised by the presence of thousands of cilia covering their body. They are found in freshwater, marine and brackish water. They are also found attached to the surface. Reproduction is primarily through asexual means (binary fission). They are slipper-shaped and also exhibit conjugation. They are easy to cultivate and widely used to study biological processes.
I strongly advise clicking through and reading the entire bit about paramecium reproduction, for a strong sense of just how simple things have gotten for some of us. Here’s what follows the section on asexual reproduction:
Sexual reproduction in Paramecium is by various methods.
In conjugation, two complementary paramecia (syngen) come together and there is a transfer of genetic material. An individual has to multiply asexually 50 times before reproducing by conjugation.
In the process of conjugation, the conjugation bridge is formed and united paramecia are known as conjugants. Macronuclei of both the cells disappear. The micronucleus of each conjugant forms 4 haploid nuclei by meiosis. Three of the nuclei degenerate. The haploid nuclei of each conjugant then fuse together to form diploid micronuclei and cross-fertilization takes place. The conjugants separate to form exconjugants. They are identical, but different from the earlier cells. Each exconjugate undergoes further division and forms 4 daughter Paramecia. Micronuclei form a new macronucleus.
Paramecium also shows autogamy i.e. self-fertilization. A new macronucleus is produced, which increases their vitality and rejuvenates them.
Cytogamy is less frequent. In cytogamy, two paramecia come in contact but there is no nuclear exchange. Paramecium rejuvenates and a new macronucleus is formed.
A Paramecia undergoes ageing and dies after 100-200 cycles of fission if they do not undergo conjugation. The macronucleus is responsible for clonal ageing. It is due to the DNA damage.
Paramecium is a real chip off the old block! And it shows us that aging is a choice made by evolution, just as sex is. Not all microorganisms do age. Most of we consider to be universal truths don’t even apply to all species on this planet, let alone to whatever other planets might have produced.
This is the logical flaw in Christian Bök’s Xenotext project, genius as it is: assuming that any “intelligent aliens” who discover the code would even have the frames of reference to allow them to interpret it. I mean, it’s also anthrocentric nonsense to believe that anyone from another planet would even care that much about us, other than perhaps to eradicate us as an obvious menace to all other lifeforms on earth, but that’s become sort of a new, post-religious article of faith for many who “believe in science.” (Pro tip: believing in science is unscientific.)
Wanting to have fixed, would-be truths in which to believe strikes me as so juvenile. Properly educated religious people learn not to linger at that stage, but who advocates for intellectual flexibility among the post-religious aside from a few morally bankrupt corporatist pundits? Well, Teju Cole comes to mind. Rebecca Solnit. And a bunch of more academic or abstruse thinkers who will never go viral for anything.
I wish I had more precise descriptors than “insects” for the winged creatures going back and forth in front of the porch this morning—all Diptera, I’m sure, but the lack of a general term for anything larger than a gnat but smaller than a cranefly is frustrating. And of course it’s telling: this is how much English speakers in aggregate pay attention to the natural world. Apart from entomologists and trout fishermen, who cares about a bunch of wee beasties (Scots English FTW) looking less like Victorian children’s book fairies than refugees from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.
cool forest a sunlit glade buzzing with house flies
Having a ridge experience means, for example, getting to the top and forgetting to pause because no scenic vista is half as interesting as cool old trees growing among the rocks. What’s my destination today? I’ll know it when I see it.
Just stopping to type that, I’ve upset a hairy woodpecker. I look up and yep, there’s a tree with nest holes beside the trail.
I don’t want to get a better camera in part because not being able to capture quite everything is still a pretty good goad to write.
summer evening a certain slant of Dickinson
LOL.
stiltgrass a black ichneumon wasp thinner than death
(Ichneumons are the ones whose eggs hatch out inside living caterpillars—the inspiration for the Alien movie universe. There are tens of thousands of species, each specializing in one species of caterpillar.)
The evil impulse is such a great teacher, as long as you ignore its instructions. I refuse to elaborate.
Trying to take more artsy photos on my walk today, instead of just spontaneously reacting to what I heard and saw, dissatisfaction led to frustration led to boredom. Eventually I stopped taking pictures altogether, and began gathering yarrow tops for beer.
a coyote in motion tends to remain in motion. a coyote at rest may or may not stay at rest.
In the beginning there were no coyotes in Pennsylvania, merely wolves. And behold, the wolves as top dogs had no sense of humor, so were easily trapped and shot out. We made that dog-shaped hole in the land. Coyote saw that hole and filled it, but not before reinventing coyoteself via repeated romantic encounters with Canadian timber wolves and thus became this uniquely Eastern Coyote phenotype which is larger more social and culturally a lot cagier around humans than their western counterparts, which makes sense—the west is way less overrun with people by and large
also, and this is of equal importance, over my lifetime a domestic dog-sized hole has emerged as our culture has changed around dog-rearing norms. when i was a kid it was exceedingly common for country people (including us) to have dogs just sort of run loose much of the time. though if they chased deer they ran a high risk of getting shot by an outraged hunter. coyotes are just way better at not getting shot. and they don’t chase deer they know they can’t catch
i mean i love dogs but let’s admit it, even the hardiest of mongrels bear the scars of centuries if not millennia of inbreeding. they’re loyal faithful and wet nosed but they’re not very bright
you know how to tell a coyote track from a dog track? the coyote track will be arrow-straight for long stretches. they’re out in the woods, or whatever, for a reason, they’re not tourists. i assume any wild dog would eventually develop similar habits were it able to survive, but few can on their own
packs or more likely family groups of feral domestic dogs were still a fairly common thing in the 1970s when i was a kid, but didn’t last long into the 80s, not around here. a century earlier feral dogs were common in the cities but now coyotes fill that niche too. i read all about it on the internet somewhere but right now i’m more committed to finishing this sentence than to doing a simple web search. and that’s the level to which blogging has sunk these days. deplorable. this idiot can’t even be arsed to deploy capital letters
turning off spellcheck on your phone is possible by the way. why follow the Man when you can be a free spirit, a leaf on the wind, an idiot with an umbrella in a thunderstorm
Wish it would hurry up and rain though. I’d look like less of a dumbass walking under this umbrella.
What? It keeps the mosquitoes off.
maybe blogging from here on out will be zuihitsu aka my Twitter feed meets Woodrat photohaiku minus some of the photos.
or maybe it’ll just be random BS I type into my phone not unlike the foregoing
i am still thinking about my eight-minute close-hand observation of a black-and-white warbler on my front porch this morning. she just completely ignored me, even after i started filming, so intent was she on gathering soft and silky oddments to line her nest, which is almost certainly not in the top of the tree where i saw her fly afterwards but in some hidden spot on the ground at the base of a tree or rock or under a bush. such un-warbler-like warblers. like friendlier, better looking nuthatches. (sorry nuthatches but you do look like the offspring of an unholy union between undertakers and bats)
here she is hoovering up some stuff beside my primitive end table with a copy of my latest poetry read, by the wonderful if occasionally terrifying Cynthia Cruz
shit this thunderstorm is going to hit, I’d better start walking back
it wouldn’t do to get my phone Max all wet. my precioussss
back before the worst of it—which now becomes my evening’s entertainment. the people who came up with the idea of a front porch understood what makes life worth living!
those people being enslaved West Africans in the Caribbean. same brilliant people who gave us the banjo. that’s two African things that everyone thinks of as purely Appalachian or Southern. well nothing is purely anything of course, but racist folklorists did a bang-up job of excluding indigenous and African contributions to Appalachian culture in their zeal to portray it as a largely Anglo-Celtic backwater. i realize i’m at the northern end of Appalachia (though only half-way up the Appalachian mountains) but there were a hell of a lot of grandkids of Eastern European and Italian immigrants in my high school class. just like anywhere else in the US. to say nothing of all the Germans who came into the area about the same time as the Irish, just higher on the social scale. and there used to be a tiny AME church in Tyrone that was close to 100 years old. a larger Black population now than in decades but they’ve always been part of the mix here. and John Henry was the most Appalachian dude ever, so, ya know…
the earlier Ulster Scots did have a preference for the mountains but i’m not sure whether that’s because they felt a unique bond with the landscape as is sometimes alleged or just because they didn’t have much of anything and had to settle for land no one else wanted. then because they were on poor marginal soils tended to specialize in the one thing that could turn a profit: growing corn and making whiskey.
when i was a kid we used to find so many century-old whiskey bottles lying out in the woods where people tossed them when they were empty. probably loggers and colliers, men and boys who lived in the woods: wood hicks. i suppose i’m a hick in that tradition though without the whiskey or quite as much hard physical labor or tree butchery. so not at all really.
but like the word redneck, it’s weird that hick became an insult. and there are so many others for county people: hayseed. bumpkin. peasant (said in a certain way). hillbilly. local yokel. native. savage. wild man. Hermit is one of the few jokey epithets that’s not an insult. but then it’s not exclusively rural, is it? you can be a hermit anywhere and an increasing number are. together in our aloneness, alone in our togetherness, sounding irritatingly like a new-Age Sufi
when i was a kid, my parents used to joke about the possibility of going woods queer—like year-round cabin fever, basically. it would be absurd and probably offensive for me to claim that as my gender identity. but i can see having it as my epitaph, if anyone bothers to make me a tombstone. it’s pithy.
Dave Bonta 1966-2066 woods queer
I mean it’s so much better than tree hugger, which has been taken over by neoliberal techno greens (a term i just made up but which is absolutely a real category)
when you live on a mountaintop, you quickly learn to unplug all modems, computers and other sensitive electronics during a thunderstorm, imagine if we had a so-called smart home. our dumb asses would be running around all the time unplugging and fussing over things. slaves to the machines we made to serve us. weighed down worse than ever by Blake’s mind-forg’d manacles.
(just because “London” is in every secondary school curriculum in the English-speaking world doesn’t mean it isn’t still a very deep, very heavy, and may i also suggest very metal poem)
