Notes from the Field

With Spring now fully arrived, I’m once more soaking in all the buzzing and peeping around the yard. The caterpillars are slinking through 
the fresh-green leaves, and I’ve already been slapping a few bothersome mosquitoes while lunching on the deck beneath our hill. So for
this month’s Red Eft video, I've decided to mingle three of Dan’s short poems inspired by those very creatures, while merging his human 
imagination---past and present---with their observed behaviors.
                                                                                                                                                        -- Suzanne

Field Notes: 3 Short Poems by Dan Stryk


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                  Caterpillar Life

   I leave this caterpillar life

       behind (the long

            night

 sluffed in my morning

      bath), to set

                                               out again: slightly

                                                   above

                                                      the Earth . . .

        Birth of a Mosquito

                Arising in my

                tearduct

                on this muggy

                night of

                wakefulness,

                to swirl

                on through the

                vortex of

                my eye socket,

                swooshing

                through rank

                nostril-

                hairs — then

                out!  That

                single whine

                returning

                to its ruby

                source, a

                despised breed,
                to live.

                                         

             Child’s Sin?

                

            How could this tiny treefrog

                    whose glistening green legs

            I’d sundered from the rough

                     pinebark he’d clung to,

                             stuck

            to restless fingers in Japan,

                     hop into my life again,

                               in

            bright-green dream, this stormy

                     night    so many years
                           beyond?

                                                   

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"Caterpillar Life" and "Child's Sin" first appeared in the journals American Tanka and Harvard Review, 

respectively. All three pieces in the video then appeared in our collaborative chapbook of epigrammatic 

poems and complementary paintings and sketches, Field Notes: Stray Musings in Brief Forms (Rubicon 

Press, Edmonton / Alberta, Canada, 2007), and later "Caterpillar Life" and "Child's Sin" were included 

in Dimming Radiance: Poems & Prose Parables (Wind Publications, 2008).