Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

Robert Frost said that. The poem? "Mending Wall." I've always loved that poem, since I first stumbled across it in my first or second year of college. I could tell you by pulling the book down from the shelf, because I used to date my books ... though that would require me to turn on the light. I look at the shelves in the half-light of the computer and realize, horror of horrors, that I have lived in one place for two full years and not alphabetized my poetry. Unbelievable!

Can't find Frost. Dickenson. Homer. Eliot. Yes, in that order, reading backwards, up the shelves. Oh here it is. Before the Eliot. On the flyleaf, with my childish signature. February 4, 1982. Not a surprise. The formative semester of my sophomore year, when I began to read for myself. So then. Mending Wall. Let's see.

I think it starts, "Something there is that loves a wall ..."

But no, in fact, surprise! It starts,

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

I love walls. I am not as fond of fences, but this one, like most of Pugsley, is right. It's meant. Someone has found it useful and it's stood the test of time because it serves a purpose, and when it was down this past six months, something was not right in the yard. So, well, now it is back up. Here were the final few shovel fulls of dirt, tamped down around the last post, which I caught from the kitchen window last weekend.

I have photos of the other side, the pretty side. Capel put the caps on and re-stained it today. But they will save for another day. Good night all.

Guest Blog: Monarch Migration Plunges, Plant Milkweed

Guest Blog
by Jonathan Skinner

I was fortunate to visit the monarch sanctuary in Zitácuaro (Estado de Michoacán, Mexico) many years back. Little could have prepared me for the erotic charge of thousands upon thousands of copulating monarch butterflies, hanging from the pines and falling through the air.

North of the border, little prepares one for the diaphanous and buoyant appearance of these hardy voyagers.

Are we prepared for a time when the glory of the monarchs' migration will live only in our childrens' storybooks? 

Excerpts from a recent New York Times article read:

The area of forest occupied by the butterflies, once as high at 50 acres, dwindled to 2.94 acres in the annual census conducted in December, Mexico’s National Commission of Natural Protected Areas disclosed at a news conference in Zitácuaro, Mexico. 

That was a 59 percent decline from the 7.14 acres of butterflies measured in December 2011.

But an equally alarming source of the decline . . . is the explosive increase in American farmland planted in soybean and corn genetically modified to tolerate herbicides. 

The American Midwest’s corn belt is a critical feeding ground for monarchs, which once found a ready source of milkweed growing between the rows of millions of acres of soybean and corn. But the ubiquitous use of herbicide-tolerant crops has enabled farmers to wipe out the milkweed, and with it much of the butterflies’ food supply. 

 A rapid expansion of farmland — more than 25 million new acres in the United States since 2007 — has eaten away grasslands and conservation reserves that supplied the monarchs with milkweed.

A more in-depth report can be found here.

When I wrote "Unfolder," I was thinking about forest fires. Fire, I now realize, takes many forms. (Including, perhaps, the fire of my own intrusion on that place.) Here is my poem for the day (originally published in Political Cactus Poems, Palm Press, 2005). 

BOYCOTT MONSANTO COMPANIES. PLANT MILKWEED. 

Unfolder

the ardent ending
monarch’s ardor began
a large wedge-shaped
cloud in the spring
thousands were taking
a fluent thoughtful nap
re nocturne, alone
all of them witch-doctors
or in a Chinese dream
woken-up philosophers
the single golden rule
overarches, ark or pendant
limpidity of clouds

overlord my monarch
the length of two thumbs
light fills the windows
clings to sun struts
grows outward, leafing
monarch emerges steeled
blood jams into wings
all that tickling insect
clasped to cock’s fuzz
is a trance, inside syrups
a poison swapped about
bitter-tasting heart’s
spasm, an orange avoid

a million pages turning
the library of spring
spotted with shadows
the piteous monarch
propagates, replenishes
ejaculates homeward
to completion in summer
the monarch’s a cloud
woven of monarchs, one
leaf journey’s length
pulsating on, from ghosts
and milkweed deposits
a universe of monarchs

lazy winter monarch
on a warm day ventures
out for nectar, rubber
in the saps & rough stems
loves the poisoned milky
fields, sleepy his “eyes”
open above the coccyx
looking for black-smudged
veiny queens, wooed
by the harmfully harmless
lauzengiers, wing deep
slips between sign & referent
are not what they seem

monarch’s no mimic
no midas, this goldfeeler
melts you to the ore
nympho or mendicant
exasperating progress
discovered by millions
with wing covered sexes
gets sticky all over
in Zitacuaro it’s quiet
piteous monarch, go
roving, unfolding, trees
branched into flames
would that you lasted


NOTE: Written on news of a forest fire at the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) sanctuary in Mexico. “Lauzengiers” is from Old Occitan and means “flatterer.” The flattery of the edible viceroy mimic (Limenitis archippus) threatens the monarchs’ warning system—bright coloration meant to warn predators of the distasteful cardenolides the monarchs sequester from milkweed. When roosting monarchs unfold their wings to gather sunlight, it is as though an entire tree bursts into flame. 

for more on Jonathan Skinner and ecopoetics, see a fine interview at Poetry Foundation here.

*

Monarch Migration Plunges to Lowest Level in Decades

www.nytimes.com

The monarch population has declined with extreme weather and a lack of the milkweed that the butterflies feed on, experts say.

Forsythia Frost, Spring

Yesterday, the Forsythia bloomed.

It put me in mind, again, of the poem by Robert Frost, which I keep meaning to write about. I'll quote it again:

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold
Her early leaf's a flower
But only so an hour
Then leaf subsides to leaf
So Adam sank to grief
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.

Every spring, like clockwork, this poem comes to me. I must have memorized it, along with others, in grade school. But I don't remember it being particularly memorable to me then. It only came back to me later, when I was a young adult and living on my own in my second apartment, a third-story nest in the top of an old house, and started to truly look at the world around me.

I noticed then, that very, very early in the spring, really late winter, before anything buds or blooms or sprouts or pushes up, the very thin furthest twig ends of certain trees start to redden. I was perched up there on the third story, and I'd look out at the horizon, a band of trees in the near distance, and the line against the sky was faintly pink, like a reverse sunset, and day by day became redder and redder until, one day, leaves appeared, the tiniest reddish bursts of color.

The second year this happened, I felt a strange kind of anticipation. This is spring coming, I'd think. It's got its own fore-runners! And I started to look around and see others. I think it was then that Frost's poem returned.

The town I grew up in, McDonald, Ohio, is a very small steel town. When we were young and growing up, its streets were lined with maple trees. Not young ones but not old ones. These were young adult trees, with robust, deep green leaves and round ball-shaped crowns, neatly marching up and down every street of the grid that mostly defines McDonald.

And I noticed a curious thing. The seeds of the maple flower before the leaves. They sprout like tiny wings, fluttering out day by day. But they're not wings, or leaves, or seeds. They're tiny little flowers. And they're not quite green. Not quite gold. They're spring.

This, I thought then, is what Robert Frost means. The seeds before the leaves. And for many years, this is what Frost's poem has meant to me.

But this year, as I pondered this poem that for me has become a seasonal pondering, I thought about the lowly forsythia. Most of the year a totally unspectacular shrub. Sometimes a wild haired scrawny child. Sometimes a tangled weed of a thing. But in the spring, before anything blooms, except perhaps the crocus, before its own leaves even, it floods the world with gold.

And that you can count on. It keeps coming back. It's pretty tough, that forsythia.

And yes, it fades, but other things come to take its place. And I just can't see that as a sad thing. And for me the Frost poem, too, is not a sad thing. It's a kind of renewal, in the spring of every year. A tradition. A chant. The harbinger.

So I say to Robert Frost, no, nothing gold can stay. But it can return. And it does. And that, that returning, that is spring, to me. And poetry.

Forced forsythia: Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Today the forsythia inside have bloomed.

There's something compelling about forsythia, one of the earliest spring blooms. And only just this year, I learned that the branches can be brought in and forced, and so I tried it, and today I have flowers (and cats who cannot resist them, alas, so they--the flowers, that is--which have gone over twice already, have to be penned up in a room with a door). A good description of how to force forsythia can be found here, on About. com. Mine took about a week to bloom.

Here they are, still frosty, outdoors this morning:

A week ago, when I brought them in:

Yesterday morning:

And today:

It puts me in mind of a poem I once puzzled over by a poet whose work I came to love many, many years ago, when I was a young poet, Rachel Blau DuPlessis. This is a selection from the opening of a much longer poem, from her book Tabula Rosa (1987).


Crowbar

Snow on o-
pen
yellow for-
sythia.

'Sno
won
open force
scythe
ya.

No one
yell ow--you
yellow mortal thing
ringed in
dull earth's icy garland.

...

Even the lever is a gleaning.
"Thou" art the fulcrum.


She's writing about flowers and women. It's not all pretty, perhaps, but then it never has been. Today, I wonder if Rachel knew that forsythia can be forced. It's interesting, the uses that a flower can make, of words. I've thought about that syllable "force" buried in forsythia, ever since I read this poem. They're a powerful flower. And still, they blow me away, both, the words yes, and the flowers, too, every spring.