Footnotes
The Tree
1. The Caucasian wingnut species (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) originated in the Caucasus region, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, and was transported to Europe in 1782 by the French botanist and statesman André Michaux. The tree was greatly valued for its fast growth and its impressive branch spread, which offers excellent shade. Capable of reaching 80 feet in height and 70 feet in branch spread, this tree excels in parks and public gardens but is too hefty for the average backyard. The Caucasian wingnut’s branches can attain such a length and weight that they often need a little propping up with cables and support poles.
…This Caucasian wingnut, which is on the Great Trees of Long Island list, arrived in the Garden in 1922 and was propagated in 1978. The original, at almost a century old, is just over 60 feet tall with a branch spread about as broad as it is tall. Its trunk is almost nine feet in diameter. [A younger, cloned tree] was planted near the site of the new Herb Garden.
There are wingnut species from other parts of the world, too, including a Japanese wingnut and a Chinese wingnut, and they are all part of the walnut family.
You read more about them here.
Free Verse
1. My longtime friend and fellow writer John Verlenden took a look at my list poems and had the urge to compress them in such a shaped outcome. I asked what that would look like in his world and that first list poem, “The Happy Travelers” came out this way:
THE HAPPY TRAVELERS
No time to stop between strokes, given the miles I swim
from job to job.
I rest in motion, exert upon arrival the force inertial theorists
discuss from static armchairs.
At one contemplative terminus I find quote vote moat stoat boat Croat remote float goat dovecote,
language collected, recited, unembarrassed at its qualities.
Seekers circle into groups, talk softly about uncertainty.
I find my voice, join the chorus in my travels from room
to socializing room.
The golden thread that snakes through Blake to modern times pulls me through the terrifying strip mall
Jerusali to my holy destinations
so many souls clawing at the walls of stony cells they’ve constructed
in collaboration with anxiety.
The farmers of ideas can calculate their limits only by abstract approximation.
Us nomads, we travel every day to tap with white canes
the insurmountable surfaces of space.
Theaters, marketplaces, schoolyards, we occasionally cross paths
may nod but not stop given contracts we’re signing
by our lives of constant movement.
Were we to travel together, matter and antimatter
would have their ultimate date with weird destruction.
Words travel with me like burrs, tumble off here, get picked up,
carried off there. Settling on soil, taking root?
Who has time to know?
We are the happy travelers taking goat stoat dovecote
and the reality of rising action at every station.
No epiphany for us. I have lost sight of the status quo
far back in the fog of the beginnings
from which I am now unbound
so long as I keep up my concentration
throughout the continuity of motion.
When it fails? (All concentration fails.) No problem,
only broken things: glasses, relationships, spirits.
We know – don’t we?
As with atoms smashed in cyclotrons
it’s through the shards we know that thing or two.
His work on the poem has created a dilemma for me. I like the way it works! It dances to a whole different tune, with much clearer articulation. But rereading my original version, I am seduced by the rhythmic flow. His version puts all the shells and stones out on the beach to glitter in the sunlight. Mine keeps the shells and stones in the surf, where they’re not as fine and clear to the eye, but the sound of the surf is there to soothe the ear.
Ach! Choices! Why do we have to make them? My Presbyterian Sunday school teacher would probably opine that we wouldn’t have to if only Eve had kept her hands off that apple in the Garden of Eden. But it’s too late now. That biblical toothpaste is not going back in the tube. Unless…wait…in this project, I can include both versions in this collection and postpone the choice. When all else fails, procrastinate. I thank John for bringing his discipline and thoughts to this process. Just as I’m able in this medium to go back and have conversations with past selves, I’m able to merge minds with distant friends. It’s liberating to escape space as well as time in this weaving of words through the years and across the miles.
John and I did a little email dance before I was able to see that the flow of my thinking could, and should, include his ideas as well as my own. For most of my life I have had this notion that as an artist I needed to operate in the Western tradition. I needed to be that rugged individualist we worship over here in the land of the allegedly free, create by myself and succeed or fail by myself. Erect sculpted monuments as if they would withstand the sands of time. I am obviously still trying to break free of this chain masquerading as freedom. It takes vigilance. It also takes appreciation. John wrote “I do understand that it is more than the poetry, that it’s about the poet’s connection, past and present, with a body of work, which is more like a conceptual artwork lying within a very humanistic context, or bed.” A context within which I don’t particularly feel like being lonely, the closer I get to death.
In the List Poem section I mentioned Wislawa Szymborska. In her poem “Under a Certain Little Star,” she includes these lines.
I apologize to everything that I cannot be everywhere.
I apologize to everyone that I cannot be every man and woman.
I want to be everywhere. I want to be every man and woman, to have the world in my bed. Well, one soul, one place at a time…
John’s impulse to compress is one I share, when it comes to the poems in this so-called “Free Verse” section. I see them as fossils: they may not precisely contain the clear moment that gave them life, but they are shapely and may inspire wonder, or a sense of pleasure in the language. At least that’s what I would hope from them.
The End of the Day
1. The idea for the structure of The End of the Day came to me in 2006 from a superficial reading of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, in the Penguin Classics version of 1966, translated and with an introduction by Nobuyuki Yuasa. It was only at the assembly of the website that I read it again with much deeper understanding. For the website I also read the other travel sketches in this publication, as well as the excellent and comprehensive introduction. I came to understand more about Matsuo Basho, the monk and poet. His project to promote “wabi”, a satisfaction with simplicity and austerity, “sabi”, an appreciation of the imperfect. How he valued “karumi”, or lightness in a work of art. He wanted to promote “muga”, the loss of awareness of one’s self, which would indeed free one’s self from one’s self. (These terms weren’t mentioned in the book, but explained on a lecture at this site.)
One of the things that most impressed me in Basho’s introductions to his travel sketches, perhaps because I identified with them, or at least aspired to identify with them, was his droll view of himself as a kind of lunatic on an insane mission. In the introduction to his sketch A Visit to the Kashima Shrine, he described himself this way: “…neither a priest nor an ordinary man was I, for I wavered ceaselessly like a bat that passes for a bird at one time and for a mouse at another.” In the introduction to The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel, he wrote:
In this mortal frame of mine which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind. This something took to writing poetry years ago, merely to amuse myself at first, but finally making it a lifelong business. It must be admitted, however, that there were times when it sank into such dejection that it was almost ready to drop its pursuit, or again times when it was so puffed up with pride that it exulted in vain victories over the others. Indeed, ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kind and another. At one time it wanted to gain security by entering the service of a court, and at another it wished to measure the depth of its ignorance by trying to be a scholar, but it was prevented from either because of its unquenchable love of poetry. The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry, and therefore, it hangs on to it more or less blindly.
He goes on to identify the prerequisite for excellence in art as “a mind to obey nature, to be one with nature, throughout the four seasons of the year.”
Emergences
1. Ctenophores, known commonly as “comb jellies,” evolved 525 million years ago and are discussed as the most ancient of animal life forms, the first to incorporate neurons. They raise the question: are all neurons in all animals evolved from a single neuron that first appeared in a ctenophore? It’s not so hard to visualize all of our neurons across all species, and since that date so many millions of years ago, being related and connected in a vast synaptic net. This picture is as intriguing as it is disturbing. Our thoughts, feelings, perceptions, sensations don’t belong solely to individuals, but are shared in a community of creatures. It’s disturbing because we share all the neuroses with those other beings, with the power to increase or decrease those glitches in the system. Think of the suffering that goes along with those short circuits and feedback loops. Watching ctenophores in operation, with their cilia pushing pulses of light along the symmetrical ridges on the outside of their bodies, it’s easy to imagine them sponsoring neural activity across species and through time. But they aren’t necessarily the peaceful trippy hubs of translucent intelligence they appear at first. When they encounter prey, which can easily include fellow ctenophores, they extend their stomachs, envelop the corpus of the prey in them, then reingest their stomachs to digest the prey, neurons included, neurons perhaps being as good a source of nutrition in the form of organic molecules – nucleic acids, proteins, carbohydrates, lipids – as any cell, I suppose.