I Wish I'd Written This

from The Morning Patio

18 May

A jet roars overhead en route to Heathrow. The rattling call of a magpie. An American gray squirrel lopes along the top of the back wall.

20 May

A wren sings in the garden of our Iranian neighbor, whose wisteria infiltrates the elder tree so that it blooms two different ways at once.

24 May

A brick lies in the dirt at the back of the garden, dislodged by the running of cats and foxes along the night-time labyrinth of walls.

7 June

Women's voices carry from a nearby garden. The resident terrier runs semi-circles around the elder tree, wheezing up at its flowering limbs.

8 June

The great, cream-colored roses glow in the sun, even those beginning to turn brown. Three carrion crows—their nasal cries.

9 June

Cardigan weather still. Cigarette smoke wafts over from the adjacent garden. Blackbird and wren trade cheerful riffs.

26 June

Hoverfly in the garden defending a cubic foot of air; someone practicing guitar in another garden—the lives I see versus lives I understand.

28 June

The elder sheds a gray feather. How can such a small tree harbor so many secrets? From a neighborhood dog, the uncanny howl of a wolf.

6 July

A tiny spider sits in a web linking mock orange to clothesline, which runs through the elder tree—she must feel each vibration in the yard.

12 July

The labored wingbeats of a wood pigeon spooked by my turning of a page, two cabbage white butterflies swirling in its wake.

15 July

The sun shines in my eyes through an eye-shaped opening in the mock orange. I tilt my head and watch the London dust drift through the beam.

– Dave Bonta

In 140 or fewer characters, every morning Dave Bonta writes what I call a prose poem and he calls "the world's least ambitious daily newspaper" – first as a twitter post and then as a blog entry – from his front porch in Plummers Hollow, Pennsylvania, a private nature reserve. Except that lately he has been on an extended visit to London, writing instead from the back patio of the house where he's staying, so the name of his blog has become The Morning Porch/Patio.

I receive the blog entries daily by email, and it's always a treat to share Dave's morning. I shared some of his front porch observations with Poets United in February 2015, so this time I am selecting from the patio posts – a very different environment no doubt, yet one he seems to find equally enthralling. He makes it fascinating and delightful for me too. I hope you agree!

He says he always sits outside with his coffee right after his morning shower, but doesn't always write the post for another hour or two. I guess that gives him plenty of time to just pay attention to whatever is going on, and absorb it.

He generously says at his blog:

Copyleft Statement

All content by Dave Bonta at The Morning Porch is licenced for reuse and creative remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike U.S. 3.0 license. This means that you can take what you like and use it as you wish, as long as I am credited as the author, a link back is provided (if online), and the resulting work is licensed under the same or similar license. Contact me for permission to reproduce Morning Porch posts in works with more traditional, restrictive copyrights.

Email me: bontasaurus [at] yahoo [dot] com.

So I hasten to declare that this "I Wish I'd Written This" post is licensed the same way.

You may be interested to know about his book, ICE MOUNTAIN, where he is described in the blurb as "poet and naturalist". 

It's available from both Amazon US and Amazon UK, and is an illustrated lament for the effects of climate change on the area where he lives. More details here.

I Wish I'd Written This

from
The Morning Porch
By Dave Bonta

July 16, 2015

Clear and cold as October, with an inversion layer to match: the rising sun grinds and thunders with the sound of the quarry to our east.

July 16, 2012
Picking bergamot leaves, I'm startled by one leaf that leaps to escape: a katydid. It watches me wild-eyed from an adjacent plant.

July 16, 2011
A Carolina wren swipes its bill back and forth on the end of a dead limb, as if sharpening a knife. A groundhog sneezes in the strong sun.

July 16, 2010
A little wood satyr—brown butterfly with yellow-rimmed eyespots—lands on the glass door and pivots at the center of its reflection.

July 16, 2009 The rabbit at the edge of the driveway seems unconcerned about my presence until a house wren starts up an alarmist propaganda campaign.

July 16, 2008
Unseen: a crash in the treetops, followed by a ripple of high-pitched squirrel alarm that travels hundreds of yards in a couple of seconds. 

I receive these in my email inbox every morning, as I follow Dave Bonta's blog, The Morning Porch, where he posts them. He seems uncertain whether they are poetry; I relate to them as prose poems. But I first came across them in the category of 'small stones', a form devised by Satya Robyn (formerly Fiona Robyn) who, with her husband, Kaspalita Thompson, started people all over the world writing them. 

A 'small stone', they told us, 'is a polished moment of paying proper attention'. Writing them is as if you went for a walk, picked up a small stone, took it home and polished it. In spirit, though not in form, they are haiku-like. Some people write them in verse, some in prose. 

Dave Bonta's posts at The Morning Porch are indeed small stones. They are also twitter posts; in fact they are that first. I'll let him tell it. This is from the 'About' page at the blog:

Welcome to the world’s least ambitious daily newspaper, in which I write no more than 140 characters each day about something I observed from my porch while drinking my morning coffee. Sometimes the results are lyrical enough to resemble poetry, but I think that’s mainly because they’re in the present tense (which uses up fewer characters than the past tense). And sure, I’m paying attention to the language as well as to the world outside my own head — I guess that’s the main point of the exercise.

All entries originate as posts at Twitter. Though the microblog medium is most often associated with ephemeral chatter, the notorious 140-character limit, like any arbitrary restraint in writing, can actually have a beneficial effect by leading one to look beyond the most ready-made words and expressions.

Of himself, Dave says:

I'm the author of several small, odd books, including Breakdown: Banjo Poems, Words on the Street: An Inaction Comic, and Odes to Tools, but my real work is at my literary blog Via Negativa. I'm the editor and publisher of Moving Poems, a webzine showcasing videopoetry and poetry film. And I've been a dedicated if somewhat unorthodox homebrewer for more than 20 years.

He is aware that I'm putting together this post and was happy to give me permission. In general, the material at his blog is covered by 'Copyleft' as follows:

All content by Dave Bonta at The Morning Porch is licenced for reuse and creative remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike U.S. 3.0 license. This means that you can take what you like and use it as you wish, as long as I am credited as the author, a link back is provided (if online), and the resulting work is licensed under the same or similar license. Contact me for permission to reproduce Morning Porch posts in works with more traditional, restrictive copyrights.

As you see, I've given you several entries from the same date each year. (The date this year when I prepared this post.) These appear at his blog, alongside each day's entry. (I don't know what happened to 2013 and 2014; his blog doesn't make it possible to find out.) The other way the posts are arranged is by key words, so I've also found you a selection on dragonflies, for no better reason than that I like dragonflies:

Tuesday October 28, 2014

Half an hour after sunrise, a shimmering oscillation, as if from a juggler of knives: despite the cold, a dragonfly is circling the yard.

Monday September 08, 2014

A green darner zips back and forth, reversing direction so abruptly it looks like a jump cut. From behind the house, the burbling of a wren.

Friday May 31, 2013

Two wood satyr butterflies careen through the yard, the dark pages of their wings marked with yellow Os. A blue dragonfly circles the house.

Saturday June 30, 2012

A light clatter like a touch typist passes under my chair: the resident chipmunk. A green darner zips in, skimming low over the porch floor.

Friday June 22, 2012

The penitential sound of a yellow-billed cuckoo. I glimpse a dragonfly out of the corner of an eye—an electric blue needle.

Thursday August 12, 2010

Dozens of dragonflies silhouetted against the sky appear and disappear in the dawn fog. The trees still drip from a storm in the wee hours.