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Posted on by Dave Bonta

Henri Cole: poet of the in-between

The May/June 2004 issue of American Poetry Review (Vol. 33, No. 3) contains five poems and an interview with Henri Cole, a prominent American poet I hadn’t spent any time with until now. Finding the poems excellent, I waded through the interview, which presented a stark contrast between an eager-to-impress and full-of-himself interviewer and the very straightforward and humble-sounding Cole. Here are a few quotes that particularly impressed me, followed by a poem.

Sometimes, I prefer the company of animals and flowers to humans, who are often not what they appear to be. But is it possible that male and female desire, including gay and straight desire, is all the same thing? That when we lie in the grass and look at the moon or at the face of the loved one, we (man or woman, gay or straight) see the same thing, which is love – an element as pure as oxygen?

* * * *

I have many artist friends. I envy them the physicality of their work. I admire their wonder and horror before the universe. I love the sensuality of their color. “As is painting, so is poetry,” Horace said. At home and faraway, I see all the paintings I can, not to take something from them, but to try to bring more power to my language. Or to put it in another way, I want to borrow from the concrete world and project it into the realm of the abstract, where the lyric exists. My artist friends constantly challenge me to see in an unformulaic, unsentimental way. I’d trade words for paint in a minute, if I thought I would be any good.

* * * *

Why I write when I do remains a mystery and an adventure – even after twenty-five years. The silences in-between are a greater mystery and, also, a source of anxiety. The two biggest influences on my work are sleeping and reading. I wish I could do them simultaneously. They make the little hamster of the unconscious run wild on its wheel. Szymborska says, “Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.'” I like the sound of that.

* * * *

The women poets writing today are stronger than the men. This just seems so obvious. We men have written ourselves into a little narrative corner, where we write very confident, professional poems with all the affects of poetry, but the reader feels no explosion of consciousness. This, in my view, is the most dreaded destiny.

* * * *

In my 20’s and 30’s, Allen Ginsberg and James Merrill were gay models of the Dionysian and Apollonian. They were like opposing magnets, and it seemed to me there was nothing in between. Though as a young poet I drank happily from the cup of the Apollonians, as I’ve matured, I’ve sought a hybrid of the two. How to be Apollonian in body and Dionysian in spirit – that is my quest.

* * * *

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH HORNETS

Hornets, two hornets buzz over my head;
I’m napping and I cannot keep my eyes open.
Do you come from far away? I ask, dozing off.
My gums are dry when I wake. A morning breeze
rakes the treetops. I can smell the earth.
The two hornets are puzzling over
something sticky on the night table,
wiping their gold heads with their arms.
Little things are like symbols. My eyes are watery
and blurred. Then I lose myself again.
I’m walking slowly in a heat haze,
my vision contracted to a tiny porthole,
drawing me to it, like flourishing palms.
I can feel blood draining out of my face.

I can feel my heart beating inside my heart,
the self receding from the center of the picture.
I can taste sugar under my tongue.
All the usual human plots of ascent
and triumph appear disrupted.
Crossing my ankles, I watch the day
vibrate around me, watch the geraniums
climb toward the little mountains
where I was born, watch the black worm
wiggling out of the window box,
hiding its head from the pale sun
that lies down on everything,
purifying it. Lord, teach me to live.
Teach me to love. Lie down on me.

– Henri Cole

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Home economics

Sometimes you need to live with other people in order to learn deep truths about yourself. Until last week, when my brother and his family moved in for an extended stay, I had no way of knowing that I had turned into this fussy old person who shuffles around the house turning off lights that others have left on.

In other words, someone with a strong resemblance to my old man.

(In many other ways, of course, Dad and I remain strikingly different people. For example, while Dad keeps two pens and a stack of 3×5 index cards in his left-hand shirt pocket to serve as a kind of retro PDA, I use a small, spiral-bound memo pad and get by with just one pen. And while he reads travel books right before bed, I read blogs.)

The other week, I decided on a sudden whim to trample a path through the weeds to the electric meter on the side of my house. An hour later, as luck would have it, the meter man showed up. Seeing a new face, I walked out to introduce myself and make sure he found the box for my parents’ house, as well. Sizing up the house and grounds, he said, “You’re a bachelor, aren’t you?”

This last recollection was sparked by a post on bungalows at not native fruit, which includes some photos of cottages half-swallowed by gardens nearly as wild as mine. Karen writes,

[A] small house is like a spiritual master. It teaches you to be disciplined, to minimize your possessions, to keep things clean and neat, to respect other people’s needs for space. You get organized, living in a small house, or you go bananas.

My spiritual master has porcupines under the dining room, groundhogs under the guest bedroom and black snakes over the kitchen. Small as this house is, it was built haphazardly in stages over the course of 150 years, with the result that it now encloses an inordinate amount of climate-controlled wildlife habitat – spaces over, under and between rooms that are virtually inaccessible to humans. Thus, even during the long stretches when I have no guests or family members sharing my space, I am never really alone. Plus, I almost never have to set traps for the white-footed mice in my kitchen. I think there’s an important spiritual lesson there.

“A small house can be comfortable and incredibly COZY,” Karen adds. Presumably, this is the experience of the shy woodland creatures who have chosen to live among us. I’m quite certain it’s true for Steve, Karylee and baby Elanor, who almost always seems pretty comfortable, as long as her diapers are dry. And sharing a rather small space with several other people instills invaluable spiritual lessons in consideration, conflict avoidance strategies and mutual respect.

Another spiritual service provided by my house is that, in really hot and humid weather such as we have been enjoying here off and on for much of the past month, it doubles as a sweat lodge. I can go upstairs for a siesta and emerge an hour later feeling relaxed and peaceful to the point of stupefaction.

Does living in a small house force me to minimize my possessions? No. Living without a steady income forces me to minimize my possessions. Yesterday, I walked all around the sidewalk sale of a local summer arts festival and admired many, diverse displays of craft-like objects without feeling any urge to pull out my wallet – except briefly for the hanging pink flamingo planters made from recycled tires. Then we went into a nearby bookstore and I dropped $30 bucks. Hey, it was a sale. I saved at least ten dollars. And, small as my house is, there’s always plenty of room for more books.

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Posted on by Dave Bonta

Some birds

DRYOCOPUS

Why do they call it drumming, what pileateds do? Why not knocking? A tree is more door than drum. Bark bears little resemblance to skin or cured hide. But the hammered beats of a pileated woodpecker are far more rapid than any rap of a knuckle – too fast, in fact, for a casual listener to count. Can we imagine being summoned by such a sound? What winged visitant bears a blazing crest & is given to such bouts of maniacal laughter? What door opens downward, into the earth?

BLAZON

Wet from its bath, a scarlet tanager lands on a dead branch in the midday heat like a hallucinated fruit. This is that hoarse singer, I think, that robin with a frog in its throat. I watch from the porch as he pivots twice, then darts up out of sight: less an exotic morsel than the rampant tongue.

MNEMONIC

“Oh, that?” I said – & thus the otherwise unremarkable, two-syllable song of the Acadian flycatcher might as well be committed to memory.

IN THE TEXAS HILL COUNTRY

Making oneself at home in a bone-dry thorn scrub no one else could love & hailing all visitors: this is the golden-cheeked warbler’s perilous way.

TROUBLE IN MIND

A pair of starlings up under the eaves is for us, out here in the hills, a novel occurrence. Though with my gaze drawn so often lately toward the northeast, my thoughts circling that high bog set in a ring of mountains & the nearby hollow full of ancient hemlocks – blank spaces bristling with arrows on the highway engineer’s map – with all that on my mind, it takes me a while to notice these two new tenants, noisy as they are.

But the male starling’s a ventriloquist, I swear he can throw his voice. And his range – odd rasping cries, hollow knocks with thrush-like runs dubbed in… I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t caught him in the act, beak ajar. Black wings flopped & rattled with each convulsive ripple of the nape, spilling iridescence in the noonday sun. As if he’d swallowed some dark rainbow & was trying to bring it back up.

The journal I’m always meaning to keep could well carry the title Year of the Starlings, were it not for this other thing that’s been robbing me of sleep: nothing but an engineer’s wet dream, an impossible outcome, I try & tell myself, even as night after restless night fixes it more & more firmly in my mind’s eye. Yesterday morning we all heard, quite distinctly, an infant wailing from somewhere in the middle of the sky. I run around the house & there sits the starling on the ridge of the roof, head cocked to one side like a diabolical robin, waiting for some untimely nightcrawler to make a move.

(Originally written in 2002. Proposed routes for a highway bypass through Rothrock State Forest, east of State College, PA, were eventually removed from consideration after intense public pressure.)

FREE BIRD

In every flock of blue jays, there’s one who learns to impersonate a red-tailed hawk, does a spot-on rendition of that piercing shred of sky. You’ve heard it, whether you know it or not: on TV & in the movies, it’s the literal call of the wild, regardless of geography.

One can understand how a mob of jays might respond to the shriek of a police whistle. But humans hear fierce defiance & thrill to images of freedom: straight through the wilderness, a highway traveled by a lone SUV while some generic eagle-like bird circles a nearby peak.

The real redtail picks at carrion by the side of the interstate or chases pigeons in Central Park, alternately aped & persecuted by the brazen jays.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Phat

That there are good fats as well as bad fats should surprise no one.

Indeed, experts say, 60% of the brain is made up of fat, 25% of which is DHA. This hardworking omega-3 fatty acid is also essential in maintaining vision by protecting the retina.

Low levels of DHA have been linked with visual disorders as well as other mental conditions, including dementia and depression.

We have heard about bad fats ad nauseum: the dull thickness under the skin and around the heart, byproduct of a hopeless but understandable effort to fend off life’s blows. But we must speak, too, about this other kind – part fish, part cream, part olive oil – that makes the skin glow and the eyes shine, as Psalm 104:15 says. In our modern, reductionist way we are accustomed to thinking about food as fuel, composed of units of heat. But there’s a kind of divine symmetry in the fact that the same fats necessary for vision and clear thinking also give the best light. Think of the five foolish virgins whom the bridegroom refused because they took no oil, “but the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps” (Matthew 25:1-13).

Losing fat not only won’t get you a ticket to the Kingdom of Heaven; it may even be hazardous to your health. According to a new study, “the physiological and metabolic stresses associated with weight loss could be so great as to outweigh the benefits of being thinner.”

A woman with the right kind of fat is a joy to others and a joy to herself. Her body is pure lubricity, able to move in several directions at once: go watch a belly dancer if you don’t believe me. One night with such a woman, my friend, & no skinny woman will ever again be able to entrance you with her momentary cry & one-dimensional hunger. The exclamation point soon loses its power to astonish, but the round curves of a question mark? Ah, there’s something to ponder! A thousand queries flood my tongue with the tang of olives.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Home and altar

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1. Home and altar seem to occupy mutually exclusive positions in the religious imagination. What happens to the home when it incorporates an altar? What happens to the altar when a religious sanctuary is converted into a private home?

2. The home as a container for personal possessions, including the weapons necessary for their defense, is very far from the idea of a sanctuary, open to all who come in peace. But in many parts of the world, the distinction is not nearly so sharp, and offering an unreserved welcome to the stranger is recognized as the foundation of ethical behavior. An important test of ethical behavior is a willingness to part with anything, should the guest’s fancy alight on it.

3. Abrahamic religion encourages a view of every stranger as a potential hypostasis of the one divinity, but whether the godhead is viewed as singular or plural is not of such great moment as the attitude toward divine representatives and representations: may they be permanently housed in stone, in wood, in icons? Or is this an impermissible encroachment on divine prerogatives? In the so-called Ten Commandments, an injunction against service to other gods is coupled with an injunction against the manufacture of religious images. Throughout the Hebrew scriptures, divinity may choose to rest in a particular place – e.g. the Ark of the Covenant, or a human heart/mind – but it remains essentially homeless and apart. It may not be compelled by rite or prayer nor encompassed by preconception or mental category.

4. As the practice of Jubilee suggests, there are no permanent possessions before God. Clinging to objects of desire is not merely a transgression against the laws of hospitality but an act of supreme impiety, a violation of the commandment against idolatry. Might the presence of an altar within the home simply be a concession to human weakness? We take whatever it is we most value and place it, literally or symbolically, among the offerings.

5. One problem with religious objects and images – fetishes, icons, priestly vestments, etc. – is that they cannot be freely given to any guest who shows an interest in them. But this may be problematic only if one sees God as uniquely transcendent and unbounded and everything else as (ideally) bounded. An animistic or pantheistic/immanentist view tends to hold that all things, including natural and man-made objects, are imbued with manas and possess a sovereignty (whether their own, or refracted) that commands respect. Earth as home becomes a sanctuary for an infinite number of guests, any of which may enter into a covenantal relationship with any other but remains otherwise free and sovereign. Abrahamic religion tries to simplify things by positing one, fundamental relationship which all others should aspire to emulate. Anything that comes into contact with the divine presence becomes a locus of uncreatedness within the midst of Creation. A shrine or altar is the physical manifestation of this paradox.

6. Within the sanctuary, the altar is the place of maximal openness – a portal, perhaps even a vortex. It need not be reserved for non-quotidian purposes: in its simplest, shamanic form it is nothing more than a chimney or smoke hole through which the shaman’s spirit too might pass into a suddenly transfigured Outside. Might the home computer, connected permanently to the Internet, provide a rough analogy? Isn’t the open source movement simply the latest manifestation of an age-old, idealistic tradition of radical hospitality?

7. The occasional necessity of breaking into one’s own home or vehicle is a peculiarly modern source of vertigo. How might such vertigo differ from the experience of Christians reenacting the Last Supper before the symbolic empty tomb, or Jews welcoming Elijah (in lieu of the Destroyer) across the threshold on Passover, inviting him to take the empty place at the table?

8. One good definition of altar is a stage upon which divine dramas are reenacted or pantomimed. These dramas need not be violent, but I believe they must, at some point, involve a sacrifice, which I interpret in the broadest possible sense as an act of renunciation, a shedding of self-centered attachments. Even non-hierarchical worldviews tend to acknowledge the sacred responsibility of periodically overcoming social or provisional boundaries between self and other, participating in a more fundamental openness or unboundedness. In the ancient Middle East and elsewhere, the marriage bed was seen as the primordial form of the altar.

9. What about the table, then? Quoting myself (a deplorable practice, I know), “Against sacrifice: Every nation-state is built around an altar; ours is no different. But I am not sure what to think about altared states of being: the bull that turned into a god in the ancient Near East, the Mesoamerican serpent demanding that the whole world shed its skin. Like so many moderns, I prefer the living with their claws and hooves, their manes and humps and barbs, their scales, their feathers. When I eat them, it is not for power. At most I might sketch their shadows, I might dream of trading colors for a world of scent. I have no ambition to don a theurgist’s cloak or wield a jewel-encrusted letter-opener to read a supposed message from another supposed world: this one’s enough. To suck the marrow yet would be too much. I don’t taste half of what I eat.”

10. But in the very next post, I advocated “For sacrifice: In Rabbinical Judaism, hermeneutics – deep reading and critical analysis – became the explicit substitute for the act of sacrifice. The connection, I take it, is that both are discriminatory. In Christianity, sacrifice continues, but in a more sublimated form: the rite of Eucharist. In both cases, the tendency is away from violence. Pueblo religion transformed the bloody sacrificial traditions of greater Mesoamerica in a similarly ingenious fashion. Prayers are animated, given shape, by carved and feathered prayer sticks fashioned by the petitioner himself, or in the case of a woman by her husband. They are, in fact, effigies of the petitioner. Their use is phenomenologically similar to the act of crossing oneself.

11. “It is at this crossroads in the self that the most important sacrifice is enacted.” This image of altar as crossroads may be the most useful of all. In a post describing the anti-shrine pictured above, I quoted Ifa priest and scholar Wande Abimbola: “Sacrifice is an act of exchange. When one makes sacrifice, one exchanges something dear, or something purchased with one’s own money, in order to sustain personal happiness. Sacrifice involves human beings in a process of exchange or denial of oneself, or giving of one’s time, forsaking one’s pleasure, food, etc., in order to be at peace with both the benevolent and malevolent supernatural powers as well as to be at peace with one’s neighbors, family, the entire environment and ultimately to be at peace with oneself.”

12. My blog is your blog. Please feel welcome, as always, to respond to any or none of these points using the comment boxes below.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Non sequiturs

The vacuum cleaner is covered with a layer of grime.

*

I carry my empty coffee cup into the kitchen & set it on the counter beside the baby bottles.

*

Halfway through my walk, it hits me: Last night, I was dreaming about witches.

*

The censor of music wears black turtleneck shirts & fancies himself a decomposer.

*

Insomnia is like instant water – add water & serve.

*

I pause in my cleaning to admire the beebalm: scarlet dust mops.

*

Out for an early walk, the rising sun warms my back even as the nighttime coolness still seeps between the buttons of my shirt.

*

I write a note to myself, cross it out & put it in my pocket.

*

Everyone assumes the fry cook likes to cook, but the truth is, she likes to feed people.

*

How long until the baby begins to suspect that the world has other flavors besides formula?

*

I have a feeling I could make a lot out of the fact that the scarlet tanager’s song is so hoarse & formless.

*

I always pause after punching down the dough to admire the imprint of my knuckles on what will soon be bread.

*

Panther amanita or green bolete, a chipmunk has nibbled most of the color off.

*

At three years of age, the asshole’s son is already well on his way to becoming an asshole.

*

Anything with a head of snakes gets compared to Medusa – how tiresome.

*

Is it really just a deerfly that keeps nuzzling the back of my neck?

*

I wonder what the turtles are up to right now?