The mother
Last night, just as it was getting dark, I heard a noise outside that I couldn’t immediately place. I went out into the garden, then around to the front porch. The sounds were coming from right inside the woods’ edge, and hard as I looked, I couldn’t see anything. But as I listened, it became increasingly obvious what I was listening to: bears. Probably the mother with three cubs that my mom saw up by the vernal ponds last month.
We’ve had this same mother bear around for about six years now, but she has yet to become habituated to us, which is probably a good thing. People are bad news. She might well be the same bear who, as a yearling cub, alerted us to the death of her sibling with her loud bawling one beautiful October morning around 10:00 o’clock. It was throatier than the bleat of a fawn, with an uncanny keening edge to it. We looked down from the front porch of my parents’ house and saw two black shapes in the springhouse lawn, not more than twenty feet away from where these bears were now.
The one that had been bawling retreated into the woods when we approached to examine the carcass – a half-grown black bear with the shaft of an arrow protruding from the middle of its back. Someone had shot it from a tree stand down in the valley, most likely, and it had gotten this far before giving up the ghost. We posted a $500 reward for any information leading to the apprehension of the would-be poacher, but nothing ever came of that – people just don’t like to rat on their neighbors. Still, the local paper picked up the story and the word went out: leave the bears the hell alone in Plummer’s Hollow.
The surviving cub was obviously pretty traumatized, but if this is the same bear, she must’ve found our end of the mountain to be a relatively hospitable place to raise a family, with three litters in the years since. I briefly considered walking over with my camera and trying to get a flash picture of a charging bear, but decided I wasn’t quite ready to risk a mauling just to get a good blog post. I stayed on the porch listening until the mosquitoes drove me back inside.
*
Right at dusk the mother bear
leads her cubs down to
the edge of the woods
& stops, hearing a screen door
ease open, smelling trouble.
My grossly unequal nose picks up
nothing of her musk or
the sweet milk oozing
from well-bit nipples.
My primate eyes are made for
the colors of day, not shades
of darkness. I peer
into every shadow between the trees,
each clot of night.
The space between us fills
with explosions of breath:
HUH. HUH.
I hear claws on tree trunks
& small things running through the brush.
When the mother clacks her teeth,
I hear the dangerous size of her
in that hollow TOCK
TOCK
TOCK.
I lean out over the porch rail, listening,
naked from the waist up.
A mosquito whines in my ear.
The fireflies, as usual,
illuminate nothing.
The next morning, when I go to look,
every rock on the hillside
has been moved from its bed.
Words on the street
Cibola 118
Reader (21)
–Quién es este labrador
que os responde y acompaña?
–Soy el que dice al revés
todas las cosas que habra.
(“Who’s this yokel of yours
always chiming in, talking back?”
“I’m the one who says the opposite
of everything there is.”)
LOPE DE VEGA
El mejor alcalde, el rey
Beyond creeds and anti-creeds, the [Neweekwe] clowns, by their ability not only to conceive but to carry out their burlesques, display their ultimate detachment from the particulars of religious beliefs of all kinds. . . . In their gluttony the clowns even violate the boundaries of their biological being: not satisfied with saying the unsayable, they eat the inedible. . . . [T]hey see boundaries, of whatever sort, as easy hurdles . . .
BARBARA TEDLOCK
The Beautiful and the Dangerous
The mouth knows nothing of yesterday.
MALINKE PROVERB
Turn-about
Taking pictures leaves a smudge on my glasses. Did I get it from the garlic shot, or from the poison ivy?
I’m reading the blogs this morning rather than writing in my own, still catching up after a week and a half of offline distractions. If I collected my various comments on other people’s blogs, would they add up to something I could post here?
Beth’s post on “Stealing the Image” and the comments it garnered have me thinking about self-consciousness – though, looking at my pocket notebook, I see I was already thinking about this first thing in the morning. Pure coincidence (as if there’s any other kind).
“So often,” I wrote, “my writing for the day begins with reflection on the act of writing itself.
“Is this just me, or does the composition of text involve self-reflexivity from the get-go? One translates perception into image, image into sound, sound into object – writing. Before, as speech, even in the mind’s ear, words were embedded in a flow. But on the page or screen they achieve some kind of autonomy – they become knowing witnesses rather than mere participants.
“The writer feels both more powerful and less powerful than the orator: more powerful, because able to employ vastly more arrangements than the mechanics of oral composition and delivery permit; less powerful, because the newly autonomous words turn the scribe into a servant of meanings that now seem continually to elude judgement. The flux is no longer between words but within them.”
In other words, to occupy oneself with written words is to become involved in a sort of infinite regression. Artists and musicians, by contrast, dwell in closer proximity to the origins of consciousness.
Sounds like horse-pokey to me, Dave!
But see, that’s the thing: I may be self-conscious, but I’m also an exhibitionist. I don’t mind letting it all hang out: the warmed-over philosophy, the half-finished poems, the ingrown toenails, the bad teeth. I revel in my imperfection.
“My body may not look like much, but let me tell you: it’s one unbelievable multi-tasker! I get dizzy just thinking about all I get done without thinking.”
I had just written the preceding sentence in my notebook when I bethought myself to stop by Maria’s blog, alembic. There I read this:
Some people collect rare coins. Others, antiques. Me, it seems, I like to keep my body well stocked with autoimmune diseases…
But the comments to that post are closed, so I am left with my mouth hanging open.
“It’s only news if the man bites the dog.” I remember an old story from the Weekly World News in which a collie carried a small child back into a burning building. “I know my dog anywhere I hear him bark,” says the old blues verse. It’s the sound of home, no matter where you are.
“You are waiting for the poodle to stick out its tongue at you and wag a friendly tail,” Maria wrote – though “you” in this context means, of course, “I.”
But the diagnosis says Lupus, “the sharp-toothed stealthy wolf.” (It helps to know that Maria is originally from Romania, which still has a healthy population of wild wolves.) And: “Poetry has turned on me, and maybe the cure, the only effective cure for it is silence.”
“No comment” is still a comment, though, isn’t it? This thing keeps turning back on itself, like a dog chasing its own tail – that wagging monstrosity of domestication that any self-respecting wild canid would long ago have caught and put to a merciful end.
Mountain state (2)
the song of the winter wren goes spiraling
into the treetops down cliff under ferndrip ledge
follows the loop of a fox grape vine
& lodges in the bend of birthwort’s
pipe-shaped flower
it twines across the altar of my concentration
electric now with offerings
every part of worry anxiety hope
& tunneling through a weave of rhododendron
the trail goes straight, gently undulating
like the narrow-gauge rail bed it once was
carrying out trees in short sections
from what somehow managed to remain wild
high bowl of a remote mountain watershed
& freed from any need to watch our feet
we scarcely notice how much we have climbed
how much we have left behind
I glide as through a gallery, hungry for visions
saunter as if along a city sidewalk
each tulip tree and oak another body
to measure against my own
each of us a stranger only to ourselves
the slick fictions we grow year by year
in rings around the so-called heartwood
where sap long since ceased to flow
I see myself held in an eye of wood
I am implicated in a ripple of grain laid bare
when the bark dropped off
but the plant people if you want
to call them that are far more timid than we are
we look at them carefully out of
the corner of an eye & pretend
only to care about identification
as if membership in a tribe or species
tells us anything beyond what name to use
when talking behind their backs
what they really have to say I think has
something to do with how to hold our ground
even the most active beings can make me feel
less like a discoverer than the discovered
is this for example the same tiger swallowtail
weaving drunkenly above the water
for the last three miles
every time I catch a glimpse of the creek?
the trail wanders past an old cellarhole with a new
display of plastic flowers that spell “Mom”
& a garden site gone wild with mountain mint
we stuff our pockets with the fragrant leaves
we pause at a spring where mossy stones sleep
like small green bears
I pull out my camera & my friend bares her teeth
here’s a veery, descending call
like a flute inside a bottle as
my friend puts it
or perhaps two flutes played by a single flautist
we cook lunch among the boulders on the creek
& afterwards go browsing for lichen patterns
my friend seeing endpapers for hand-made books
I spend a short century in a smiling contest
with the mossy head of a demiurge of stone
rising from the water, lines of bubbles
swimming slowly through its patch of sun
rich baritone voice in a language I feel
I can almost understand
& all around it the creek in shadow
& I am whispering encantado,
desencantado like a child
slowly plucking the spokes of a daisy
cantar is still the commonest
verb for “sing” in Spanish so
to be encantado really means to be caught
in a web of song I muse
focusing one at a time on each
voice in the watery chorus
on the walk back we find a redrock shelf
at the edge of the creek pitted with potholes
some empty, others cupping moon-shaped pieces
of sky & a few mosquito larvae
wriggling back & forth in what
doubtless only looks like ecstasy
I can say anything, I think, arrogant
in my power to make little worlds from words
but anything I can say falls short of this world
its liquid laughter pure from the beginning
free of the salt of tears
just before leaving we stop at a spring with a waterfall
& a black PVC viaduct strung on a cable
gravity water for someone whose dog barks
from the other side of the creek
we fill all our bottles
& thrust cupped hands into the flow
surely water clear as glass should let us
see into some kind of future
or at least as far as the mountain’s stone heart
but it’s my own arteries I see
throbbing in my wrists
I lower my face to the would-be window & drink
the next day on the flat-topped Allegheny Front
I study the cousinship of peak & bog
the same plants so often growing on both
& here the two kinds of places merge into one
when I piss at the edge of a dry boulder field
I hear the splash of water into water
Dolly Sods is still beautiful still teeming with life
despite its horrific usage by arrogant humans
who saw nothing but timber, pasturage
& a bombing range during World War II
natural extremity makes it at once more vulnerable
& more likely to resist the tendency of the badly used
to become ugly common & mean
& I know nothing, I think, suddenly ashamed
of my inability to look beyond wounds to
the grace & power of the wounded
which includes virtually every part of this land
which has been your land and my land for far too long
& needs to be its own land again
an interpretive sign explains how
wind-tortured red spruce trees grow branches
only on the leeward side for decades until
other spruce grow in around them & then
they knot their roots together among the rocks
gather stillness & the spongy beginnings
of new humus between their trunks
make a place too moist for lightning
to strike a spark & then all together
they rise up
on the drive home the edge of my concentration
grows blunt as a butter knife
which is to say I lose my temper
& my ordinarily kind companion loses hers
& we ride in silence for a while
discoveries made in a mountain state
must not be transferable I think glumly
everything we found remains behind
but the truth turns out to be otherwise
because unbeknownst to us
three craneflies got into the car at the last stop
before our long descent
& we can’t get rid of them
rolling down the window at the strategic moment
only blows them into the back of the car
& though for a while we think they’re gone
eventually they reappear
dancing in front of the windshield on flimsy wings
their long legs dangling & we give up
& laugh & let them ride & by the time
we get back I’ve forgotten all about them
I carry my gear into the house unpack & sit out
on my front porch watching the fireflies blink
under a second-quarter moon
until my eyes won’t stay open any longer
where state lines fall is an accident of history
& come to think of it I have yet
to leave the mountains
we will keep on returning whichever way we travel
the mountain state is still there & so are we
Words on the street
Cibola 117
Simon Zopeloxochitl (conclusion)
My lord, this stranger whose dream-
double I could never find, this shaper
of destinies, his mist still lingers.
Though one who took
the ash heap for a mother,
the crossroads for a father–
though a slave–his rumor
still lends an iridescence
to these ruined cliffs.
In the end as in the beginning
no tongue is equal to its task,
a soft piece of leather flapping
between flint knives.
The sayings of the wise,
the paintings,
the flowery songs–all vanish
in the flames of rebirth. And since
even the sages couldn’t tell
whether we dream or wake,
how can our strongest spells
be more
than smoke?
My lord Yacatecuhtli,
the vulture is a thing that circles
& never has to land.
Everything he sees is on the way
to its final appointment:
all words to him
are last words.
Grant your servant instead
the penultimate: the four-
cornered flower
turning in the dark, rooted
between fire & water, is & was.
In the day that nears,
let the dawn star alone
feed the sun.
__________
Most of the metaphors in this segment are based on classical Aztec kennings. The two sentences beginning “The sayings of the wise” echo common themes in Aztec poetry.
dream-double – An animal alter-ego who lives in the underworld, where the sorcerer travels in dreams. Killing someone’s double results in their own death.
Yacatecuhtli – Patron deity of travelers, especially long-distance traders. Simon is addressing his human patron as if he were the avatar of this god.
Accident, take 2
THERE ARE NO ACCIDENTS. I think it was no accident that I came across a quote from Franz Kafka last night – to the effect that if you remain quite still and solitary, “the world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” Will it? I am an empty cup. What will show itself?
– Tom Montag, Curlew: Home, Chapter 1 – “The Journey,” third paragraph
The natural history of peace
A couple newly scanned articles were added to the archive of articles on peaceful societies at Peaceful Societies.org this morning. Of greatest general interest is one called “The Natural History of Peace: A Positive View of Human Nature and Its Potential,” by Leslie Sponsel.
Sponsel reviews a vast range of literature to support his argument that peace is an essential part of the human experience. While he does not deny the obvious reality of violence and warfare in the past and present, his evidence casts strong doubts on many of the arguments made by those who maintain that humanity is intrinsically violent. The author reviews literature from biology, primate ethology, human ethology, human paleontology, prehistoric archaeology, ethnology and ethnography to make several critical conclusions: that human violence is not inevitable; that warfare is not universal; that peacefulness prevails, and has prevailed, in many societies; and that humans, by nature, can be either peaceful or violent.