Category: Riffs

Streams of consciousness, automatic writing, running at the mouth, and/or beatings of dead horses.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

At the Charles Simic reading

The aging soundman saunters down front to fiddle with the mike and won’t leave, mimicking the famous poet they’ve all come to see. With his bad posture and offstage clothes, it’s a travesty, compounded by a highly questionable accent. “Well, you know – ” he’ll say, and improvise another droll story about his supposed life in New Hampshire or childhood in Belgrade during the war.

A few stray pieces of paper and two or three books have been left at the podium, and he picks them up one at a time and peers down quizzically, as if addressing several exceptional frogs at the bottom of a well. He ends each poem – if that’s what they are – with an audible sniff and consults his watch. It’s the modern kind, he explains – it doesn’t tick.

The imposter’s grin never quite leaves his face. He holds up the famous poet’s most famous book – printed in large type, you see, so as to take more room on the page – and claims it’s nothing but a doodle in the margins of his memoirs. A likely story! It’s boring to describe what really happened. A writer always prefers to make things up. So you say.

The overflow audience crowds the floor, up to within an arm’s length of his feet. Many of them are here by choice, it seems, and would have every right to feel cheated, but only a few people get up and leave. He goes on for forty-seven minutes, stops, and takes a few tentative steps away from the podium as applause breaks out, mingled with appreciative laughter for an almost fully credible performance.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Holes

If only the personal weren’t, as they say, so political. If only the person-holes called leaders were a bit less personable. If only the suction from those walking vacuums weren’t always so goddamn difficult to resist.

Autumn is the time for longing thoughts, they say; rapid change makes us yearn for stasis. It’s autumn, it’s raining, & I crave the familiarity of cliché. What is a cliché, after all, but an aborted proverb? One man’s culture of life is another man’s petri dish. (To say nothing of the women, of course.)

If only failure were not, as they say, an option. If misery really were capable of love, what loving company a miserable failure might find himself in. The great and powerful POTUS side-by-side with a scruffy, self-promoting documentary filmmaker: what fearful asymmetry! If only a mere Google bomb could blow the manhole cover off that septic stream of lies. But the lies are old news, and in the U.S.A., old news is no news – good news for those who stand to profit off the unstoppable buck, the bull market, the zero worship.

The rain started two hours before dawn while I was in the shower, so that when I stuck my damp head out the door, I heard the soft deliberate footfalls of a burglar in the grass, on the porch roof. Take all you want, I said – as if anything here were mine to part with in the first place.

Every morning I scan the headlines, shaping my lips & tongue unconsciously around the new-yet-strangely-familiar-&-comforting litany of other people’s misery. (I’m only a fully silent reader in company.) Earthquake, hurricane, I whisper, mudslide, flood. A school roof collapses like a sick joke on the heads of schoolchildren; an art museum is flattened by a floating casino. Whole towns are buried under suddenly wakeful, supposedly sacred mountains. Library collections turn gray & mushy in the mouths of their most thorough readers ever.

All that future, down the shit hole. All those centuries of incense & slow fasting.

What does it mean to be a lyric poet in times of widespread disaster & a global extinction crisis? What does it mean to cherish quietness, faced with the absolute silence of the null set? Words too easily succumb to a dervish vertigo. I am bone-tired of this present tense, its tightly wrapped present of tension, waiting for an epiphany that may be nothing like what we have ever imagined that we deserve. I am sick to death of the prayerful moment. I want to tell the wonder-junky in me, shut your goddamn slavering cake hole with some actual cake, for once. Fill your glistening eyes with some light-hearted miracle, some fancy contraption involving hidden wires & gaps in the fabric that earns a standing ovation from your pants. Get a real job. Consume. Obey.

Last month I lost my only set of keys & ever since, everywhere I look, there’s another keyhole right at eye-level. No peeping, now, I have to admonish myself. The world can go to hell, and maybe it will; a wrong thing never turns right. Someone lives in there, I have to think.
__________

With gratitude for the influence of Chris Clarke’s much more analytical series on The Anatomy of Bad News (here, here, here, and here, with more to come, I hope).

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Eight ways of looking at an octopus

1. They are voracious predators, though they have no backbone – no hard parts at all, in fact. They often change color to match their prey, and when threatened, they attempt to hide in a cloud of ink. And sometimes, for no known reason, they go on a frenzy of self-consumption, ending in their own death. Republicans?

2. Octopuses (see here for a discussion of other plural forms) have long been known to commit autophagy – that is, to eat themselves, starting with the tips of their arms and working their way up. The precise reason isn’t known; stress and infection by some unknown virus are the reasons most often postulated. One of the few other creatures known to commit autophagy is the laboratory rat, so possibly a certain threshold of intelligence must be reached before a creature can attain this level of perversity.

3. Sometime in the late Renaissance, imaginative Christians began to associate the octopus with Christ. Whatever this may mean in evolutionary terms, it’s definitely a step up the food chain from the Jesus fish.

An on-line abstract of an article from a French journal discusses the persistence of this image of “The Autophagous Christ”:

Father Chesneau’s sixty-third Eucharistic emblem has the octopus as a symbol of Christ. This being justified by the fact both octopus and Christ are autophagous. So by the middle of the XVIIth century a theological treatise on the Holy Sacrament can put forward an extremely realistic proposition, thus resuming an astonishing point in the debate on the Eucharist: the autophagy of Christ. This article endeavours to seize [sic] how, after the Council of Trent, Catholics went on using the controversial figure of an autophagous Christ in their debates, and to question the way it came to be used in a book of emblems of Augustinian bent.

4. The Christ-as-octopus image is an interesting example of convergent mythological evolution. Samoans and Kiribatians believe in an octopus god named Na Kika, who assisted the trickster god Nareau the Younger in the creation of the world. In this case, the octopus’ ability to survive on land as well as in the water seems to have given rise to the conception of octopus as mediator between island and ocean.

5. Symbols, of course, have their separate evolutionary history; the ancestral symbol to the autophagous Christ is the ouroborus.

6. Philosophically, autophagy is the antithesis of autopoiesis, which any biological definition of life cannot fail to take into account. The capacity of systems to self-organize also constitutes the strongest argument for the viability of social anarchism. Note, however, that anarchists themselves, like Republicans, often resort to autophagy. Their inability to agree upon how to describe anarchism for the Wikipedia is typical, and also ironic, given that the Wikipedia is itself an outstanding example of a successful anarchistic system.

7. In my dreams about trees, whenever a tree walks, its roots move over the earth like octopus tentacles. Even waking, I’ve noticed that old yellow birch trees often seem on the verge of opening bloodshot eyes. Just look at the way their roots engulf the ground.

8. Of all their attributes, what I envy most about octopuses is their power to change color, and sometimes shape, to match the environment. If I could do that, I could sleep almost anywhere – the world would be my oyster bed.

Sleep in a state or national park and it’s called camping. Sleep in a town or city park and it’s called vagrancy. Sleep in a refugee camp and it’s called dispossession. In so many ways, it seems, one person’s vacation is another person’s prison sentence. And yet, when we sleep, don’t we all inhabit the same country?

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that this post was sparked by an e-mail exchange with my brother Mark, whose birthday is October 8. Happy birthday, buddy.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Close

After one day with low humidity (Wednesday), it’s back to being almost unbearably close & sticky. Even thinking seems too great an effort. Frustrated, I lean back in my chair & turn my head upside-down, gazing at the ceiling until floor & ceiling trade places. How clean & uncluttered the house suddenly appears!

Outside in my garden, a monarch glides in & lands on the butterfly weed, orange rhyming with orange. After a few minutes it lifts off & lands on the budleia’s purple torch. Stained glass wings sail rather than flutter. Thanks to its larval nursing on milkweed poisons, the monarch is able to save for transcontinental journeys the energy it would otherwise have to expend on chaos – the typical butterfly strategy for evading capture.

Up at my parents’ house, a red-spotted purple clings to the kitchen screen door handle, dusting the knob for thumbprints. Its wings are tattered & faded, with three large holes torn out of the bottom edges. I picture the phoebe diving for the dark abdomen & coming up with a beak full of dry leaves. Close, but no cigar.

I’m peeling my first ripe peach of the season. The stem gone, I can see into the center where the halves of the pit have pulled apart. I hold it up to the light. It glows like the sun’s own chapel, golden yellow. But as I cut the flesh away, a mound of mold appears in each hemisphere of the pit, in size & color identical to the clumps of dust that gather in the backs of closets & under the bed.

As I walk back down to the other house, I think: closeness is something that alternately attracts and repels. Here the cockleburs, there the tear-thumb; here beggar ticks, there raspberry canes. I duck my head to dodge a wasp, swipe ineffectually at a mosquito.

Back at my writing table, I stare at the ceiling some more. This is like doing the back stroke – the only style of swimming I enjoy. Once or twice each summer it’s fun to go to some little lake in the mountains & bare my fishbelly-pale skin to the too-close sun, ears under the waterline, kicking & sculling just enough to stay afloat. It’s so quiet under the water. And the sky looks more & more like another, fully inhabitable world, so clean & uncluttered.

The peach was delicious.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Nest:

Never empty. Empty.

Chalice, ringworm, birthmark, mole.

Halo, mandorla. The oriole’s aureole.

Home made by instinct, reproducing the architecture of desire.

Mandala. Prayer wheel.

Round because the egg is round.

Round because the breast is round.

Round because the tree is round.

Round because the horizon is round.

Coiled basket. The snake’s embrace.

Gape, gullet, belly.

A big fat zero.

The kind of thing I write when I don’t know what else to write, gazing at the hairy nest of my navel.

“People say snails carry their homes around with them. But I think because they secrete their whorled calcium carbonate shells out of their own bodies and cannot be detached from them (in life) we should say snails are their own homes.

“They can close the front door with the operculum at the end of their stomach-foot.”
– ever so humble

“How alert and vigilant the birds are, even when absorbed in building their nests!”
– John Burroughs, Wake-Robin

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Underground

The agent of God’s wrath rolls a ginger candy from one side of his mouth to the other and steps out through the sliding doors just before they close. He is not wearing gloves or sunglasses. You could not pick him out of a lineup. The briefcase that he placed with such great gentleness between the feet of several other passengers in the over-crowded subway car is an entirely ordinary briefcase; there is nothing to suggest that it might be capable of opening & opening & opening. He is one of a half million souls who will return another day, God willing, & will fold his newspaper carefully in order to avoid intruding upon his seat mates, reading the sports pages, the celebrity gossip, the updates on the manhunt for those who forfeit every claim to continued membership in the human race. This morning, he takes the stairs up to the street. A woman going the other way gives him the oddest look.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Aftermath

Image Hosted by ImageShack.usSometimes I feel nostalgia for the present moment, a fresh footprint filling with water, the huge black bear’s intelligent muzzle swinging left & right as he climbs out of the marsh beside the springhouse & ambles off down the driveway. His strength is in his loins, & his force is in the navel of his belly. When I was between the ages of nine and twelve I had a recurring dream about a pond dotted with lotuses in which the shadows of golden carp could sometimes be glimpsed, & if I raised one foot like a heron, my other foot would slowly leave the ground & I could float through the air a few feet above the surface of land or water with only my unvoiced intention to set my course. I would wake up convinced that such levitation lay within my abilities, if only I could find that pond and stand on its shore. This was, I realized later, a dream about the soul, the existence of which I did not then & do not now fully credit. But what I loved most about that dream was that the moment I took my right foot off the ground, a hush descended. All sounds turned distant & echoey like the song of a veery. It was as if the air had suddenly grown thick, or my ears had flooded with water in the aftermath of some great, improbable thing.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Exclosure

Another thing about Abdul-goddamn-Walid

In his emails, there’s always a facetious quotation line running all the way down the left-hand margin, functioning a bit like the unpaired left parenthesis sometimes encountered in a modernist poem: it throws one a bit off-balance, waiting anxiously for the right parenthesis that never comes (in some of those self-consciously difficult poems I used to badger myself into reading, I remember finding multiple left parentheses (ironic little eyebrows raised at the reader’s increasing bafflement at one would-be parenthetical phrase after another (“oh poor thing, he’s searching for closure” (or at least for the proverbial other shoe to drop (and I was, too, because after reading a poem or email like that it’s hard to shake the impression that all the right-hand parentheses and close-quotes have decamped to some point beyond the horizon – that sliver of a new moon, say – and everything short of it has been rendered, well, parenthetical (not “wheels within wheels,” but the opposite: a feeling that no starting point can ever be returned to, as hard as we pedal this zero-cycle (there are no arrivals, only departures (what goes around disappears into a vortex.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Accident

Welcome to Accident, Maryland

In the town of Accident, lawns are cratered from the impacts of meteorites and loose pieces of passing jets. People who would never consider sitting in a tree during a thunderstorm regularly commit themselves to four-wheeled suicide machines for work and pleasure. Hometown boys and girls volunteer for slavery and the slaying of enemies, because they need the work. No one deliberates for very long before taking action – or inaction, as the case may be. People huddle anxiously in front of their televisions awaiting news and updates about the gods, who live outrageously as only immortals are able. “We work hard, and we play hard, too,” they say when prompted.

In the town of Accident, they’ve never not been at war. The Indian wars, the wars for political independence and/or somebody’s freedom, the mine wars, the war against nature – it’s always the same terror, a cold winter coming on with hunger already showing its sallow face. Better stock up on happy meals. The wolf must be kept from the door, they say, placing bounties and sending their crack shots off into the wilderness. Their love is a jealous love, but their friendships are chancy affairs which they feel free to walk away from as soon as the other turns out not to be a comfortable mirror image of themselves.

In the town of Accident, license and power are frequently dressed up as Freedom and led around the streets in an open cart. On Memorial Day, they serve magic funnel cakes that reappear as often as they are eaten. Here is the church and here is the steeple, and here is heaven right now where we can enjoy it. Why seek enlightenment if you can’t know when you’re enlightened? Knowledge is fucking, this we know, for the Bible tells us so! (“And Abraham knew his wife Sarah, and she conceived.”) In the town of Accident, no one can conceive of different ways of knowing. In their public schools, children learn about frogs by picking through their corpses rather than by sitting quietly at the edge of a marsh for several years.

In the town of Accident, New Agers view nature as a treasure house of archetypes and spirit guides, and spokespeople for the extractive industries wax rhapsodic about Mother Nature and Wise Use. Their mythology employs a special, arcane term for the outcome of conflict: progress. They think that those who do not know the truth – such as the people in all the neighboring towns – will be much the worse for it, so they’re really doing them a favor by burning their crops and houses and killing all their fighting-age males.

In the town of Accident, a single backward glance can turn every accident into a happy one. Perhaps it’s true that, as our mayor says, mistakes were made. But Someone has a plan, and we’re all in it. This, in fact, is the pinnacle of wisdom: to know that there is not and has never been such a thing as Accident. Spread the word.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Right then

The iodized salt psychic has a framed certificate from the board of health mounted behind his rickety office desk. Why, I wonder, is my imagination cluttered with such useless things? Why do I remember that dead leaf on the driveway, turning over like the page of a well-thumbed volume perused by the wind? What does it mean – if anything – that a black cat not merely crosses my path day and night, but is raising three kittens in the barn, all as feral as she? Are all of them black? Yes, as black as the jack of diamonds – aside from the parts that are white, of course. Have you been missing any songbirds? How many should we have? How many do you hear? All of them, I think. But sometimes I sleep with my windows shut.

This morning it was chilly but beautiful. I woke late and sat out on the porch watching, well, everything there was to watch. It’s not as easy as it sounds, because my attention kept wandering back to an erotic dream I’d had. You know. It had me whispering sweet nothings in the morning’s ear: “All my life has been nothing but a preparation for this moment.” Which one? The sun works its way down the side of my house, but I keep my eyes on the woods. Dew drips from the eaves. Yesterday I went to an auction of old farm tools and was thrilled and mesmerized by the auctioneer’s cadence, but I’m not thinking about that right now. I’ve gone 180 degrees, in fact: I’m busy jotting down some haiku in my little reporter’s notebook, which all day long at the auction never left my pocket.

Cool morning.
Crystal-clear air carries
a whiff of sewage.

Indigo bunting,
yellow warbler trade songs –
same syllable count.

Chilly morning.
A chipmunk stops to scold
in a patch of sunlight.

One drums, the other yammers:
the pileateds agree
to disagree.

When the sun clears the top
of the tall maple
I’ll go get breakfast.

And I do. Inside, it’s just another morning. Are there really still these same four walls? How strange! But I have work to do. I need to stop thinking about what I’ve been thinking about and think about something else, I think, and at the very moment I’m thinking this, something goes bump in the crawl space under the floor. Bump, it goes. Gee, thanks, Doc! I’m glad you agree.