Saturday, May 2, 2015

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).