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Dave Bonta
ravens
climbing into
each other’s sky
circling crying
out
above the road bank where
the hepatica has just come into bloom,
the corpse of a porcupine
carrion beetles clamber
through the quills
butterflies cluster on what’s left of its mouth
a hole spanned by the long, curved
railings of its teeth
& down below, the pale blue blossoms
swaying on their stems
To go for a walk in the woods during the day is to participate in a fantasy of knowing through seeing. The mysterious unknown is pushed back, engendering the desire to keep walking just to see what’s around the next bend. At night, all such illusions fall away. The forest we’ve just walked through retains its essential unknowability. Without darkness, the very possibility of the wild becomes endangered.
From off in the darkness, the sound of a porcupine clacking its teeth. Against what threat, I wonder?
It goes on and on. Somebody doesn’t have much sense.
in this foreign land
Norway maple leaves turn
ugly
upside-down somehow
in my phone’s photo
false Solomon’s-seal
backwater
stream-blurred trees come into
sharper focus
Keep Your Dog on a Leash
the notice board co-signed
by porcupine teeth
It’s cold. Mid-day
and the hepatica flowers are still
only half-open, nodding
on their thin stalks.
My mother tallies them up—
stroke-marks in her notebook.
At the top of a hemlock tree,
a porcupine sleeps in a sunlit
halo of quills.
When it died, the porcupine
leaked its fluids onto the snow
like a junker car.
I turn it over
with a stick: no sign
of a wound.
Startled up from the forest floor,
sixteen doves go whistling
into the snow squall.