Photos – Via Negativa

November 1, 2024November 1, 2024 by Dave Bonta

The Legend of Sleepless Hollow

insomnia is a well
as bright as an October moon

i lower my bucket
it comes back with ground fog

day breaks
over eyelashed horizons

the sleep i didn’t get leads me
on through the morning

like the proverbial donkey
following a dangled stone

day passes in the long
intervals between blinks

fallen leaves curled like fetuses
soon bury my tracks

October 12, 2024October 14, 2024 by Dave Bonta

You’ve been courting disaster long enough. Isn’t it time you got hitched? You in a suit of rain, with your lucky feet. She in her thunderwear, the ship that launched a thousand faces as close as the phone vibrating in your pocket.

beach bodies rushing to water a stranded whale

from whiptail: journal of the single-line poem, Issue 10 (June 2014)

Raised by Trees

Before my salad days, I was sour as cabbage. I grieved as publicly as a mower for its meadow, cried on every occasion—a virtuoso of tears. Except, my mother noted, when she took me to the woods: as the sky filled with leaves, my last tearful gasp for breath drew in the leaf-mould and the silence and I would fall still. Grief may have been my natural habitat, but the forest soon became my strengthening medicine. Before I even learned to talk, I knew that long sighs could mean happiness among the pines, and that time passes differently in a sunlit glade. And long after I grew out of my bluest period, the forest continued to be a refuge from my own self-centeredness, a place where I could practice being human.

leaping rock to rock the children I never had

from Woodrat Photohaiku, 12 October 2024

September 28, 2024September 28, 2024 by Dave Bonta

The Silent Walk

for Beth

at the heart of a hike
another cup of tea

where a tree frog plays
his solitary gambit

everything drips except the hawk
dropping in after squirrels

through one hole in the canopy
and vanishing through another

at the beginning of autumn
my desire is still green

for the plushness of moss
the luster of rhododendron

and the brownish green
of newly grounded acorns

but what do you hear
above the din in your head

traffic and the rainy forest
their unknowing duet

how an acorn rolling past me has
a different knock for every rock

and raindrops seem more discriminate
when they fall from trees

their patter is a language
known to salamanders

and what do you see
when you put the scroll to sleep

fog envelopes us
and turns the light green

i open my umbrella
like a tattered black flower

the holes in its sky
let the darkness out

and what do you feel
when the craving ends

my lungs go on tirelessly
processing clouds

September 26, 2024September 26, 2024 by Dave Bonta

Better Angels

The section of the woods I call the moss garden was full of death angels today. The camera in my phone doesn’t quite know what to do with them, too deathly pale against the rain-darkened moss — they throw the white balance completely off.

I pass a porcupine just as she’s emerging from her door at the base of an oak. She must’ve heard me coming — her bristles are up. I stop and say Hi in a friendly voice. She gazes back, her beady eyes unreadable, retreating into the tree as I continue past.

I used to say that the porcupine was my totem animal but I don’t make that joke anymore. I let the boutique left convince me that this represented a heinous appropriation of indigenous culture. It’s true that more than once in my life porcupines have appeared like omens or indeed guides precisely when I most needed them. But I am not enough of a narcissist to believe they actually bother about me at all. Occam’s Razor suggests instead that they are simply wild creatures going about their lives, which randomly intersect with our own.

Which is part of the attraction, of course. The ideal guide would ignore me altogether! How dreary to be somebody, as one of my dead role models once said. I just want to vanish like a needle into the world’s haystack.

I should add somewhat parenthetically though that as a poet, one gets used to ascribing meaning to events in nature in a largely playful way, which preserves the autonomy of its actors apart from our narrative webs. This is the power of the lyric mode to elevate meaning without abstracting it from all context in the ummwelt. It’s why I believe everyone should practice poetry. It softens the hard lines between things. Its highest truths always take the form of a paradox.

For twenty minutes after the rain stops, the tree I’m sitting against keeps dripping on my boot. Arching my neck back, I can watch the drop gathering to fall, then feel it on my toes two seconds later: the sort of simple, synesthetic pleasure money can’t buy.

The same tree is dropping acorns, and that too is a pleasure: the minor thrill each time of having been passed over by the angel of hard knocks. Until I’m not, and a lump sprouts atop my head like a lizard’s third eye. I’ll open it every full moon.