Oryctology

Brood XIX

2011-11-26T12:45:00.000-08:00

By the time we get to Nashville
the party is mostly over,
dead bodies strewn across the sidewalks.

"Two weeks ago,"
Says Dr. F, walking quite fast,
"We wouldn't have been able to hear
each other speak"

Waves to show the little space between us.

",above the noise."

Makes a sweeping gesture to the trees.
"I like it. It reminds me of growing up."

Down by the river,
desparate virgins lurk in the woods
wailing

(easy to take their songs for wails of frustration
these late-comers who might have missed their chance
but, of course
the male cries because that is all he knows how to do)

the path is studded with narrow wells
conduits to the past
and it's not too hard to count by thirteens
1998 - the Lewinsky brood
1985 - the Contra brood
1972 - the Watergate brood

only 14 broods back Old Hickory is in the White House, still grieving,

and wondering about his assets back in Hermitage.

He writes to brother of his just dead wife, son of the Col. founder of Nashborough,

June 7 1829 - To John Donelson
……………..
P.S. Mr. Steel has written me but one letter say to him to write me how much crop he has in, how many coalts, lambs & calves and how my last years coalts are–and of the health of my Negroes–I learn old Ned & Jack are both dead–Jack was a fine boy, but if hew was well attended to, I lament not–he has gone the way of all the earth–

[If the ages in the Hermitage register of 1829 are correct "Old" Ned, might have seen four broods, Jack, dead at 17, just missed seeing two.]

but the past is dead
the travails of man and bug are separate threads
they pull apart cleanly like an insect from its skin

we can search for meaning in the spectacle:
thirteen years of tax on the trees
sapped drop by drop by the waiting grub
then the explosion of screams and sex and death
the hungry mouths of birds
bodies dropping from the trees
a windfall paid back to the forest soil
less the hundred thousand eggs
stealed away in twigs
and some weeks hence
mostly unnoticed
a second rain
grubs fall to the soil
to burrow down,
down
through the husks of their ancestors
to search and find
the root

the promise of return
the fullness of the season and the gathering of things

but I'm afraid I've dug myself too deep
down here at the bottom of the well
staring up at my nearly teenage daughter
one brood hence
regarding me with exasperation.

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Rufous-sided Tiger-cart

2011-11-18T16:40:00.000-08:00

unlike its northern cousin, the Rufous-sided Tiger-cart is a solitary creature. Much like a large constrictor it ambushes its prey and then retires to a secluded location to digest the meal which can take several weeks. This individual has only recently captured what appears to be a juvenile Silver Spinner although without a clear view of the field marks it is difficult to place it to species. There are no recorded attacks on humans, and clearly this cart was full and docile when I observed it. Nevertheless I kept a safe distance.

Luna

2011-09-13T16:59:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure if anyone has ever posted a photo of some sunflowers against the night sky on the

internet. So I thought I would, just in case.

I think that bright thing is the moon, even though it looks more like a streetlight.

Snakes on an inclined plane

2011-08-15T23:52:00.000-07:00

this doesn't have anything to do with anything

i [never tried and] failed to photograph
the ring-necked snakes
that crossed our path

the first was like a meteor
slid already into duff
revealed in act of disappear

but I should have just grabbed it

the second like an ied
tread past; unseen by me
erupting after, gone again

and the third and fourth and fifth
which are like God

BROS COMING DOWN THE HILL
WITH BABES
SAY, "DUDE LOOK OUT:
THERE'S SNAKES AHEAD"

"Rattlesnakes?" I ask, with hope,

"Um. Yeah," Already gone downhill

"Awesome," I say.

but

"Thanks," I mean?

I mean awesome

But the shadows swell already on the trail
there won't be anymore
snakes today.

Autosuggestive

2011-06-03T15:36:00.000-07:00

Collected Field Recordings 2003 - 2004 by neilkelleyca

I know how this looks.

Addendum: I swam in that pool. The locals eyed me with some suspicion. That's the "show-me" thing, I guess.

Heron hunts his shadow

2011-03-25T00:13:00.000-07:00

>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
budburst on the oaks and
maps the (?)
brains of a billion dead jays
(treescape is the corvid canon)

something I was going to tell you was
dream about a netflix queue I don't
have
stupid
this dream lost and found and lost and found again
so seemed significant
reiteration defines some emptiness

dude

in the same yard
dread assembly
lost photography
melted eras and lapsed monthes

the way things va.

Ekphrasis for the, very much alive, raccoon beneath my dog last night in the southwest corner of the yard

2010-12-01T21:04:00.000-08:00

[much snarling, spitting, biting, scratching]

the mate bails over the fence. "Clyde! No! Leave it! Drop it!"
[more snarling, spitting, biting, scratching]

I am in my stocking feet.

Finally, release is achieved the raccoon is rapidly up the tree and gone.

I tow Clyde by the scruff inside.

Later the dabbing of minor facial wounds.

I scraped my knee on the tree.

A trip to the dump.

2010-11-21T20:44:00.000-08:00

These are some days after and once autumn-crisped thoughts have gone all fuzzy, one bleeding into the other solved by beer and stress.

Let me start over.

This I remember: sparrows skulk in the bushes like rapists. Speed-walkers. I take a handful of feral fennel seed and crush them in my fingers, the aroma marries-well with the wet-tobacco-leather-newspaper smell of the landfill.

A pheasant kicks up close across the slough. He's what I have been trying to imagine into clapper rails these crok crokings in the tules. I imagine reflexively throwing an imaginary twelve-gauge up to trace the cock's rocket glight across the way, &&&.

We're all strangers on the land here, me, the pheasant and the fennel. Exotic garbage piled up on the bay shore. We've had our uses.

Compulsively I compile a list of birds: white pelican, avocets wanding their beaks as they do, egrets, whatever, teal, mallards, some feral polluted mongrel duck with them, shovelers in loads, clouds of peeps blow about ominously, audibly I mean, earlier we watch a snowy egret hunting in the effluent kicking up poor scared fish like a freaking dinosaur, I already told you about the sparrows, ring-billed gulls gyre like witches, hawks, whatever, some terns, grebes, geese, I don't know,

Maybe a bird without sinister regard,

There was more to say. Another rail running quick across the mud that I knew anyways was just a mudhen when I saw it.

I want to say, "Isn't all of it?"

What does it mean;

Elegy for the roadkilled raccoon

2010-10-05T16:50:00.001-07:00

whisper under your breath:

Procyon lotor

repeat as necessary

(six times yesterday)

http://www.wildlifecrossing.net/california/

Writing Bad Poetry Is Easy and Fun

2010-09-17T17:59:00.000-07:00

(for CS)

The vapor clots sit right here

not high or low

a little low, I guess

not fog

the announcer on NPR

shilling for pledges

just said

"get high or go home"

don't think that's what he meant

to say--

a higher register,

Pigeons: spin, strut and puff on lamp posts

Crows: more left to right than vice or verse

have you seen Robert Reich's tumblr?

the guy's so tiny and so smart

but I'm not finished

Gulls: several

Egrets: plenty but I wasn't paying attention

Cormorants: forgot to check the transmission tower but they must be there and I saw one later anyway

Buteo: fine but only saw, up by the clouds because now I'm looking

Turkey Condor: ditto

Pelicans: both flavors brown and white

but look less different in this light

Tern: turns

and dinosaurs across the bay

August Bugs

2010-08-19T00:55:00.002-07:00

it was not, anyways, this beetle but forgive, the details now escape me. But here is what I remember: the humidity, a tram across the tarmac out to the turbo-prop, this was Toronto couldn't tell you much about it, a puddle jumper across to Cleveland, this is August, the whine of jets, the whine of tree crickets and cicadas somewhere beyond which I surely couldn't hear, and beetles massing, landing on clothes and carry-ons dragged across the sticky concrete, this is the evening, twilight maybe, and the passengers trudging up the fold-down stairway and the beetles swarming about us, clouds express boarding straight into a cabin above our head, back of the line, front of the plane, beetles hurtling against reading lights circling in lazy loops to alight on window shades, many passengers are not amused, one woman particularly is upset, a cabin full of insects, the cabin doors are closing, whines from the engines and taxiing across the runway and the beetles are still restless, knocking, swarming, settling, the attendant struggles to calm the passengers, dole out snacks, we're in the air already I suppose, half-way there, a cart down the aisle and the irate woman is more irate about something, and more and more, I can't remember, a misplaced order? hurling abuse at the attendent, angry, evil, treating this poor young woman like crap, and she explains, whatever, I can't remember, patiently, ever angrier the passenger, griping, sniping, moving, the attendant asks her to take her seat, we are about to land, the angry woman refusing, and then, an army of beetles sets upon her, she's shrieking, now back in her seat but they keep coming, the attendant buckles in for the final approach, she turns to me and confides:

"they are my pets."

Apologies all around.

2010-07-01T11:05:00.001-07:00

Smoke Break Ornithological Notes, ca. 2005

2010-05-31T14:44:00.000-07:00

Crows are going nuts all over that palm tree, pulling tasty morsels out of the petiole covered trunk. Cockroaches I'll bet.

Anna's zips off right at the moment it drops a load into empty space. Looks like a miniature shit-propelled rocket.

Alate

2010-04-16T16:06:00.000-07:00

cottonwood seeds dance Brownian
about a million tiny, shimmering
reversed snowflakes rising off the
patio--alates, termites,
Reticulitermes hesperus, I'd guess
a nuptial flight:
most organisms flood the world with babies
and hope a few survive;
termites force their reproductive
caste en masse from the dark
subterranean galleries that are
the only world the cast outs
have ever known
into the glaring sunlight,
a dessicating world filled with
mouths

the hapless twist in cobwebs
or turn pointless circles on the
concrete, fragile wings
mangled and broken
and still they pour from
clumpy towers and rise like lazy
sparks into the air

, the swifts collapsing chatters overhead

if I owned this house I suppose I would be
alarmed at this surface spectacle that
hints at goings on below
but I am a renter, and moving soon,
and I think I will have another beer
and watch the hummingbirds
hum and go

2010-02-17T12:36:00.000-08:00

Two-bit tyrant

2010-02-08T22:29:00.000-08:00

It's February and, for suburban california anyway, the flower situation is still pretty bleak. Some radishes, calendula, the first wave of spring bulbs. But this little guy is a visionary, a speculator. Perched on dormant grapes, he gloats. Carving out great U-shaped arcs above the garden each punctuated with a percussive squeak. "Some months from now, ladies," he boasts, "all this will be sage and epilobium as far as the eye can see--red blossoms bursting from silver bushes--paradise on Earth. You'll want to get in on the ground floor of this one, trust me."

what a douche.

Bathroom Poem

2010-02-03T19:49:00.000-08:00

Sometime past midnight;
Spiders doing
Spider jobs.

2009-12-16T21:25:00.000-08:00

I live smack dab in the concentrated creamy center of the Pacific flyway. This makes me lucky.

The Art of Blogging

2009-08-19T14:45:00.000-07:00

Diffusivity

2009-06-06T00:50:00.000-07:00

The Mockingbird Sings At Midnight

2009-03-19T01:02:00.000-07:00

which might be spy code, but really is just what's going on right now.

except, actually, it is one.

Hermit

2009-03-11T18:37:00.000-07:00

That morning I was out in the backyard glassesless and in my bed clothes. Which is to say, in my clothes from the day before, slept in.

The medium brown job in the northwest corner of the yard might have been any other medium brown job except it wasn't.

Turdy to my foggy warped lenses. Not a robin. I thought it might be a Varied, whom I'd been missing all winter. Except it wasn't.

The light played across my retinae like a hammer missing a nail.

It poked around the bamboo, then, over the fence and gone. Back inside I figured it out.

Oh.

I must learn to appreciate these moments.

Prognostications

2009-02-02T21:20:00.000-08:00

The woodchuck lived in a fairly depopulated corner of Northern Ohio. Then one day, he died. In death, this ex-woodchuck liked to hang out alongside a trail that led into a large, old field. One that had not been mowed or plowed in many, many years. Each morning I would walk past the dead marmot on my way into the field. On business. Each afternoon, I would walk back out and note that the marmot had swoll'd up just a tad bit more in the summer heat. The face was puffy and grimaced. The small limbs out-stretched in rigorous pose. The abdomen continued to bloat ominously.

One morning the groundhog was gone. In his place was a ground-hog sized puddle. A black, greasy, fetid smear. The squirrel had not been smelling very good before. Now he smelled terrible.

This was 2001 and Spanish Joe had predicted an early spring. Dunkirk Dave concurred. Punxsutawney Phil, ever the curmudgeon, called for six more weeks of winter. Anyway, though it was already July.

Visitors

2008-11-20T23:55:00.000-08:00

they came
in the night

2008-09-27T01:03:00.000-07:00

a cricket in Southern China with a hollow song.
sounds like: not so much a real insect
a recording. a simulacrum of an insect
a cricket ringtone. my mandarin,
my english to my chinese colleagues
hollow. the outside of meaning only.

Bat watching in Guiyang: a bat shaped hole against the sky.

The endless call and response of car horns
falls into an evening lull, over the ceaseless drones
of rooftop fans
guards mill smartly nine floors below
up here, the electric chatter of echolocations
bat shaped black holes
tracers across a violet sky

Cast offs.

2008-07-29T20:22:00.000-07:00

Empty
naiad.

Falkens öga

2008-07-19T01:37:00.000-07:00

Surprisingly few birds on the north half of Kehoe beach. A few gulls. Squadrons of brown pelican bombers emerging from the offshore fog only to disappear again before the camera could be focussed. The occasional turkey vulture loops out over the bluffs and back again on a nonexistent breeze. A dead baby sea lion.

Then falcons. Two flapping across the cliff, more graceless than you're imagining. The dog--on leash relief in light of the absent shorebirds and surprisingly good behavior--dashed to the base of the cliff, barked pointlessly. The perched looked on with disdain, although there's no way I could have possibly seen that.

The dog gave up and came back to pirate cheese and crackers. One falcon disappeared, but the other sat on the faulted cliff face. Gargoyle.

On the way back an empty fridge...washed up on the strand. "Satan's cabin." There was a cricket inside. A brown bird frapping flantically across the bluff. Falcon.

Seriously, not that impressive.
then,

falcons.

The Bear that Wasn't There

2008-05-20T17:39:00.000-07:00

The naturalist is a landscape painter in reverse. We strip successive layers of meaning away from the world around us--sometimes in great flowing sheets; more often in ragged, irregular fragments--until, what remains?

During the last great mast Jeremy and I wandered through the back door of the Salinas reservoir. Across the way a great black figure foraged in the golden oats beneath a tremendous valley oak. Stupidly, I thought it was a bull--until the creature raised his head, sniffed the air and broke into a lazy lope. In half-a-dozen strides, maybe less, it was over the ridge, and gone. I haven't seen a wild bear since.

Three times, maybe more, I've come close: stumbling across fresh prints and stale feces. These semiotic stand-ins are exhilarating and boring. They sit there frozen while I'll fumble for the camera and snap away. They permit my prying gaze without protest. They suffer my boastful posing--like a trophy hunter with a twisted carcass I try to measure up against the lifeless form.

A real bear has far more dignity than that.

So weary...

2008-04-09T23:53:00.000-07:00

Just by way of update. Two Golden-crowneds, jaunting fresh summer caps, up from god-knows what sun-baked winter scratching grounds perched on the fence and beaded me with shining black eyes. Then sang.

Sol Mi Do

2008-03-26T23:00:00.000-07:00

The Golden-crowneds are, as best I can tell, already gone. Gone certainly are the days when their short, sad song set pace to the quiet days of winter. "Oh Dear Me" or, "I'm Lonely" as it's heard by the distressed and distraught. I'm partial to the busted 49er version: "No Gold Here"...if only for the element of ironic self-denial.

The schizo-autistic babble of the polyglot, the self-righteous swainsonses' scream, it's all rubbish to the somniacal siren song of winter complacency: "Roll over."

Ones Would Be

2008-03-14T00:42:00.000-07:00

right?

Goose Summer

2008-02-27T01:08:00.001-08:00

At the margins of perception, in the twilight of paranoia, magic is spun into reality. Virtual photons sparkle on the event horizon, the boulder is rolled back and Schrödinger's cat has gone inexplicably missing, always, already, again.

But these are spring sentiments.

The magic of spring is charming enough--bursting blossoms, hidden eggs. But the true spring is but a pale reflection of winter dreaming.

Autumn is the true season of magic, dark rites, sacrifice, communication with the dead...A memory from the fall: it is Goose Summer -- warm and lines of silk loop along the avenues, catching upon limb and lamppost.

I hear the collapsing call of swifts overhead--I squint and, maybe, see them. The vanguard of aerial biota, twisting and diving, surely sucking unfortunately lofty spiderlings into their gaping maw.

Our words already fade like leaves and our obfuscations, like the wind, have spirited us away.

Placeholder

2008-02-26T21:44:00.001-08:00

Text, life, shadows.
welcome to Oryctology.