It was driven by greed, sure, but it didn’t have to be. It would have happened anyway: “Here, look, these people are cold. I’ll just build a little fire for them, here, in the brush.”

And it’s driven by hatred, sure: “I want fire on that hill.” Phosphorus. Uranium.

Greed and hatred make it worse, but the world would’ve burned anyway, just because there is fire. He had the best intentions. He just tripped, they say.

For thousands of years people told the story, in the past tense. That the medicine of the story keep the flame in the fire pit. But gradually people forgot the old ways. A new age dawned. The Modern Age. People are smart now. People are more intelligent now than they used to be. But do they even know which planet they are living on? They think there are a bunch of them. “Hey, let’s build another planet.” “Make a fire, so we can cook it up.”

They forgot that it had all happened before. Where did they think all that charcoal coming out of the ground had come from? A temperate forest? A cool savanna? A place where it snowed in the winter?

“The deer kept moving closer to her for about forty-five minutes. Sometimes it would tap the ground a little to try to get her attention, but the cat never turned around—she just sat on the rock with her back to him. Finally the deer made a sound: it was like a moan, or a lowing, or like a long “baa.” Mushroom’s ears turned backwards but she didn’t turn her head.”

(Where, after all, could it lead?
And if I turned around, and met your soft gaze, what then?
Would you approach me further? Would we touch our noses?
And then, what then?)

In the mid 1980s, while working for Imagen, I was writing the page and engine handling code for a state-of-the-art Kodak laser printer. This amazing and very expensive machine could duplex, collate, and print on card stock—all at the same time and all at sixty (later ninety) pages per minute. Best of all, I had my very own prototype in a lab to play with, so I began publishing a series of chapbooks. Dr. Luis Trabb-Pardo, a particularly well-cultured gentleman and Imagen’s founder and CEO, continued to pay me—a testament to the vision and tolerance of one of the best Silicon Valley companies in that decade. I sewed the books by hand.

Most of the books are in Lucida, which had just been designed (especially for laser printers) by Chuck Bigelow and Kris Holmes, also at Imagen at that time. I did the typesetting in “troff,” somewhat old fashioned even then. But consider: I can still open the files on any platform—there are no non-printing characters–and it’s easy to write filters to manipulate the text (such as arranging the pages for signature printing). What if I had used one of those dreadful word processing programs? Try to find a filter for any of them now!

Physics for the Heart, Dale Pendell, 1986

Chasing the Cranes: a cycle of  renga, linked haiku,  by Steve Sanfield and Dale Pendell, 1985

As a Heron Unsettles a Quiet Pool: Nine Poems for Mary, Tim McNulty, 1988. Delicately crafted poems by the gifted writer and naturalist from the Olympic Peninsula.

Swirling Dale Pendell, 1986

Circling: a cycle of linked hoops Steve Sanfield & John Brandi, 1988.

Rough Cuts & Kindling Dale Pendell, 1986.

Tulips Ana Rossetti. Translated by Susan Suntree and Nancy Dale Nieman, 1990. Cover drawing by Jacqueline Bellon. These were the first translations of the prize-winning Spanish poet/novelist/performer and pop icon to appear in English. The poems are as sexy as Jacquline Bellon’s drawings.

Mokujiki: Thirteen Tanka Translated by Kazuaki Tanahashi & Dale Pendell, 1988. Mokujiki Gogyo (1718-1810) was an itinerate Buddhist poet and carver. The cover is a self-portrait Mokujiki carved during a one night stay at Rengeji Temple.

City Limits Blues Dale Pendell, 1986. A series of haiku and senryu mostly written during one broken-hearted week at the end of 1967. “Reading Issa” was reprinted as Holy Uncertainty #1, the first of Steve Sanfield’s hard-to-find series of poem cards.

I Hate the Men You Sleep With Will Staple, 1992. My all time favorites from the irascible poet-coyote.

Eros, The Muse, and Other Poems: Explorations in Relationship and the Greek Lyric. Dale and Laura McCarthy Pendell, 2000. These are primarily workings from Sappho—a mixture of translation and conjuring. We made it a game: wherever words were extant on a fragment, they had to be translated—these were the “anchor points.” But the game was to fill in the missing lines. One of us would write two lines, then hand it to the other person to do the next two lines, and so on. The translated words and phrases are in bold type. We’ve shared our games with several “real” translators—sadly, they are not amused.

Leaf Songs Dale Pendell, 2000. We printed just a few of these for the “Leaves of the Shepherdess” Salvia divinorum conference held at Breitenbush Hot Springs in December. The poem is really a transcription, rather than a composition. It was spoken and sung; Laura Pendell playing keyboard and J. M. Nasim his electrified “psychedelic” Jew’s Harp. I had prepared a slide show, going by at about one frame a second, that was actually coordinated to images and lines in the poem. This presented a challenge for Kat Harrison, who was operating the projector, when I’d start improvising.

Ekphrasis x 11 Laura McCarthy Pendell, 2002. Eleven poems based on the surrealistic paintings of Remedios Varo.

Celebrations of the Body, Celebrations of the Heart, Laura Pendell, 2008. Twenty-five copies printed for “Stealing the Fire,” a poetry reading at the North Columbia Cultural Center.

Four Political Poems, Dale Pendell, 2008. Twenty-five copies printed for “Stealing the Fire,” a poetry reading at the North Columbia Cultural Center.

Seeding the New Year, Dale and Laura Pendell, 2008. A poetic relay for the New Year. One hundred numbered copies.

The book is available from Three Hands Press, http://www.threehandspress.com/language_of_birds.php

Reviews

Turfing review by Gwyllm Llwydd

“There is no safety in divination, it exposes you to too much. Once the doors of the temple is knocked open by the Oracle, everything is up for grabs. Yet safety, could be divined as stasis, and if there is something to be said, The Language Of Birds is about a constant state of flow. Chance, and Fortune are expressions of the Dao, if nothing else. Think tidal; no think madness, think poetry.  Bards, Olaves, calling forth, calling upon the Oracle; some are lucky, and some are not.”   –Gwyllm Llwydd

Tiny acorns
sinew sewn
door to three worlds:
earthworm head twitch
milk trail
how the gods crossed the sky
how it comes to grief
nutmeg membrane
bodhisattva’s vow
whiff of perfume
one way.

26 April

A man in the church
whom everyone thought had died,
had a houseful
of gizmos:
some of them would spin
seemingly
by their own volition, one
floated, suspended in the air, above
a silver plate. Uncle Ed
was perpetual motion itself—
almost all of
his inventions moved,
or dinged, or raised a flag, or released
a springy clown.
My mother, when she had to acknowledge him at all,
which was rare, called him an “inventor” but privately
scoffed “he thinks he’s Rube Goldberg.”
which I always heard as “rude”
and with which I did not agree
because he had hundreds of little drawers
filled with tiny screws and springs
and all labeled.
and he was always nice
to us kids and to me especially
and would explain to me,
or try to,
the secrets of the mechanisms
of his devices
and would show me
how his tools worked.
The police
arrested him one day
on what my father would only call
“a morals charge.”
After that we were not allowed
to stop by Uncle Ed’s
on the way home from school
and my mother said
“He’s not really
your uncle.”

25 April

A late spring rain—
merely a sprinkling
washing the pollen from the pines,
but inscribing every surface
with a curious yellow script:
the long stanzas
of the one true poem.

24 April

The voice that silences
begins as an
interruption.
This interruption
occurred so long ago
on a playground inhabited
by ragged dolls and menacing giants,
by pennies and the petals
pulled from daisies, or perhaps,
at a dinner table ruled by the Father God,
that rupture began to seem
the natural fabric of the world:
a habit of life for which you
made a place in your own wardrobe,
and for which, being clever, you found precedent
in the conversations of immortals
or in the budding of a leaf:
a transcendental rapture
clothed in virtue.

At a place not so far away—
in the valley beyond a high mountain pass,
or in the murmurings you occasionally hear
from those inside, sitting around a small fire
passing a pipe of tobacco, a blanket
woven by the grandmother of your grandmother
lies folded on the ground—
not excessively distinguished, not,
perhaps, embroidered with lions or eagles,
but bearing your patient name.

23 April

Solitude nurtures its own delusion;
hypocrisy courts a crowd:
“You are true gold,”
says the one seeking favor.
“You are true silver, and shall be gold soon,”
replies the gallant.
They found a diseased man,
with tumors and sores on his body,
and brought him before the court,
to which he turned his back.
Heroism
is as easy as saying “No.”

22 April