Coyote Crossing

My poetry sucked back then, a sorry mix
of adolescent pain and ignorance,
dormant-tree metaphors, bleak sky and rain,
cold rain — my poems’ rain was always cold —
and I watched, staring out through leaded panes
at winter landscapes, shades of brown and gray
orders of magnitude more colorful
than my heart’s anemic range of hue.
That’s just the way it works, of course. That’s just
the way the adolescent’s heart is wound,
or how mine was at any rate, a wild
indignant void, alone, too smart by half
and less intelligent than the fabled
sack filled with hammers. I wore no scars then
except the loneliness they issued me
at birth, a sick and swelling sense of need
unmet, and here and there a festering
parental accusation of complete
and utter uselessness. No one had cracked
the heart that pined oblique in scattered sheaves
of onionskin, pale lines of type on them,
ten point elite, the Q and upper case
A nearly gone. My poetry sucked back then,
a sheer simplistic longing for a touch
I had not known, indignant that a world
of lovers did not recognize my worth
and come to me. It’s lost, it’s better lost,
all burned one angry night, all left behind.
I have forgotten nearly all of it,
stanza and line, my memory seared
then salted like some Punic battlefield
after a Pyrrhic love had conquered it.

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I got some hate mail today in response to an article I wrote seven years ago.

I have to admit that I was picking a fight with that article, so I deserve every bit of the hate mail I’ve received in response, then and now: every capital letter of it, every misused ‘YOUR” where there should properly have been a “YOU’RE” preceding the phrase “AN IDIOT,” all of it.

The article was written for my erstwhile Contra Costa Times (and nationally syndicated from there) column The Irascible Gardener. Today’s correspondent read it on Counterpunch, which fine ranty website I had forgotten I’d sent it to. In the interest of making my email inbox more engaging, I’m republishing it here once again.

The article is outdated. It concerns the centuries-old quest for a blue rose. Two years ago the Suntory Corporation claimed to have successfully engineered the first blue rose, a picture of which is embedded to the left. This claim was clearly an overreach. There have been plenty of conventionally bred roses that have achieved this shade. This shade is not even remotely blue. How do I know? I admit that color judgments are often subjective, that colors are not particularly amenable to precise definition with simple English words, and that one person’s azure is another person’s bluish teal.

Still, I think it’s clear that Suntory’s 2008 “blue rose” is more properly described as “lilac,” or “light mauve,” or something other than blue. As supporting evidence for my contention I offer this handy and informative chart:

My point being that while the article may be outdated in some specifics, it has held up well in its general point. Here it is. Send hatemail to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Blue’s Clueless

Accuracy and fairness are important tenets of journalism, and so let me start by saying that not all rosarians are insane.

This assertion may be hard for the non-rosarian to believe. Given the thousands of available plants with which a gardener might become obsessed, cacti or begonias or natives or heirloom peppers, why would anyone in his or her right mind choose the hybrid tea rose? This most disease-prone of plants is a pesticide salesman’s dream come true.

That’s not hyperbole. You can trust me: I used to sell pesticides. Were it not for hybrid tea roses, my employers might have gone bankrupt. There were regular applications of systemic insecticides. There were fungicides to control the ubiquitous fungal diseases: black spot, powdery mildew and rust. Occasionally, I’d sell soil fumigants to people replacing their old, ailing hybrid teas with newer, not yet ailing hybrid teas. Our repeat customers would develop whitefly infestations after insecticides had killed all the predatory insects in the garden. We’d sell them stuff to kill the whiteflies, which — as whiteflies only go away if you stop spraying — constituted a job security measure on our part.

And all for what? Rows of thorn-covered sticks poking oddly out of the ground. Sometimes a few leaves adorn the sticks, generally with unsightly spots on them. Why one wouldn’t just plant ocotillos and be done with it is hard to fathom.

“Why, the blooms, of course!” will cry the defensive rosarians in the crowd. And while hybrid tea blossoms pale before the brilliant red trumpets of an ocotillo, they’re lovely flowers. Mostly. If botrytis doesn’t get them, that is, and if black spot hasn’t sapped the plant’s vigor, and if rose decline hasn’t sent the entire garden into a downward spiral. And if you don’t insist all of them smell like roses. Some hybrid teas do carry a faint scent vaguely resembling the heady aroma characteristic of the genus from which they were whelped. There are trade-offs to consider here. With hybrid teas, one must, generally, choose between fragrance and what rosarians refer to as “disease resistance,” which means the variety being discussed will actually have some green leaf surface showing through the black spot.

It gets worse. So monomaniacal are hard-line rosarians that they permit no other plant to contaminate their gardens: not a sprig of alyssum, no turf, no spring crocus or narcissus may defile their rows of thorn sticks, all identical except during that fleeting season of sterile scentless bloom. Such rose gardens seem less garden than farmer’s field, like rows of brussels sprouts with plowed soil between them — except that brussels sprouts farmers plant cover crops, come to think of it.

Still, not all rosarians are insane. Maybe even most of them aren’t. Most that I’ve met lately, for instance, are rethinking that whole sterile soil between the rows thing, interplanting their roses with herbs, or spring bulbs, or even tomatoes. Old rose species are continuing the comeback they started about two decades ago, with vigorous, brilliantly-scented gallicas and dog roses gaining favor as tough, droughty hedges with tasty hips. The Lady Banks rose (Rosa banksiae) has become nearly ubiquitous in the Bay Area, and rightly so: a tough climber covered with long-lasting flowers, which — in the white form — even smells like a rose. In many nurseries, hybrid teas are now outnumbered by floribundas, which bear smaller, generally more fragrant blossoms on “disease-resistant” plants that actually seem to resist disease.

And promising new rose selections are hitting the nurseries as well. A dozen varieties of ground cover rose are for sale nowadays (“Red Ribbons” is a nice one, almost overplanted lately), and then there are such specialties as the deep-shade-tolerant native Rosa californica: light on bloom, but an interesting form in a traditionally hard spot to garden. As rosarians tend toward diversity in their plantings, and a sense of perspective in their garden plans—with even hybrid tea fanciers making room for other living things on their properties — the truly insane rosarian is getting harder and harder to find.

Which is why I was surprised, a few weeks ago, to read an item in the paper describing rosarians working with genetic engineers to create something never before seen in nature: a blue-flowered rose. Vanderbilt University researchers are splicing human liver enzyme genes into roses, hoping that the enzyme will turn the flowers blue. Apparently, black spot isn’t enough: these guys want roses to get liver spots as well.

In the story, San Francisco rosarian James Armstrong was quoted as saying “It would be nice to see a blue rose, and the only way that’s going to happen is through genetic engineering.” I too think it would be nice to see a blue rose, assuming that blue is the variable kind of color naturally produced by most plants, a result of a complex interplay of genetics and cellular chemistry, benign viruses and sun and soil and temperature. (If the white coats succeed in breeding a rose that looks as if it has been dipped in blue dye, then I can suggest an easier way to get there.)

Let’s look at the larger picture. I also think it would be nice to have salad vegetables that fertilize themselves, but I’m not about to ask Burpee to splice horse genes into my tomatoes so that I can plant “Manure Girls.” Part of growing plants—indeed, part of growing UP—is recognizing the limits within which one has to work.

True, gardeners do fight these limits as much as anyone, what with our tarps, mulches and anti-transpirant sprays, our lath houses and protected south-facing walls.

But it’s one thing to try to get your radishes to weather a cold snap. It’s another thing to try to get your radishes to grow peacock plumage.

Despite my radical environmentalism, I am not a knee-jerk “anti” when it comes to genetic engineering. I was excited when I heard of the new Vitamin-A-precursor-enhanced “Golden Rice,” intended to help alleviate nutritional deficiencies in developing countries. (Of course, it turned out a body would need to eat a hundred pounds of the stuff a day to get the beta carotene contained in a medium-sized carrot, but that’s beside the point.) I’m intrigued by thoughts of splicing malaria immunity into Anopheles mosquitos, which might save hundreds of thousands of lives a year. Where a world problem exists that could reasonably be alleviated by genetic research, I’m all for at least considering it.

That said, what, exactly, is wrong with a world that lacks blue roses? There are plenty of blue-flowering plants that do just fine in the same conditions as hybrid tea roses: right off the top of my head there’s ceanothus, bearded irises, lobelia, delphinium. Alyogyne flowers even look more or less like single roses.

The only reason I can think of for having any interest at all in a blue rose is really wanting blue flowers in your garden, but for some reason being utterly, pathologically unwilling to plant anything other than roses. But that would be… what’s the word I’m looking for?

Insane.

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And then when I woke up my pillow was gone.

When he came down to Los Angeles to live he had that head tilt issue, a common symptom of inner ear infections in rabbits. The corresponding dizziness made it hard for him to groom himself in the way he preferred, and it also meant that sometimes he just didn’t feel up to getting all the way to the litter box before taking a leak.

As a result, when Becky dropped him off, though she’d taken very good care of him, his undercarriage was in need of some maintenance. The horrible stuff stuck to his fur only took a couple days to get rid of. That was a priority: matted horrible stuff on rabbit fur can hide fly eggs, the presence of which (and subsequent natural phenomena I will not discuss here) is called fly strike, which is one of the frillion things from which rabbits can drop dead. I would flip him on his back in the crook of my right arm, work cornstarch into various clumps, slowly ease the cornstarch-lubricated clumps off of him, and then boil my hands. Every so often he would keep things lively by trying to escape. Putting rabbits on their back is supposed to “hypnotize” them, and Thistle, to describe whom there really should be a male equivalent for the word “dominatrix” — “carrot top,” maybe — does not submit willingly to such indignities.

Once that urgent issue was addressed, we started to address the more chronic grooming problems. His illness corresponded with a shed, and moving to LA — warmer than Pinole — started another, and so the little incipient mats that he could not curry off himself began to grow. I gave him a week or two to recover from the first round, then started on the mats.

Thistle is of the mini-rex breed. Mini-rexen have very thick, velvety fur. I tried for a while to work with a wire slicker brush like those used on cats, but it just wasn’t equal to the task. Looking online provided me with a bewildering selection of expensive mat cutter blades, bunny afro-picks, clippers and other such arcana, all of them rather pricy. Fortunately, I found a rather specialized tool in our junk drawer that worked perfectly.

The worst of the mats also required I subject Himself to the hated backflip. Eventually we got those worked out, a cubic centimeter of Gordian furball at a time. The trickiest ones were on his chest: he refused to let me in between his forelegs with the comb.

About two weeks ago I realized that I could reach his furry chest just fine with him just sitting on the floor. He even seemed to like it. What’s more, I found he would obligingly arch his back to let me comb his belly.

And so the grooming has changed from rabbit torture and humiliation to a pleasant daily routine for both of us. It’s calming for me to engage my primate need to groom something, it keeps him cleaner, and he gets attended to by a subordinate cringing on hands and knees. We’re all happier.

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Writing proceeds apace on the Joshua tree book. I’ve finished a chapter that introduces the dynamics of the grass-fire cycle, and am getting ready to dive into the next one without stopping for breath.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking spurred by Beth’s post here, on the fate of fine writing and small-house print publishing in the wake of the Internet. (Why yes. Nets can have wakes. I’ve seen them.) In particular, I’ve been thinking about this passage toward the end of her post, where she works toward a Conclusion To Be Expanded Upon Later:

It may be a radical concept, but I think serious poets and writers (especially those emerging from blogging and online grassroots communities, rather than the academia and the traditional literary world) need to gain the self-respect and confidence to refrain from publishing all their work for free online, so that their collected works in print gain in value and desirability.

She has a point. I’ve decided that with perhaps a couple exceptions along the way — work for which I’m soliciting specific feedback, maybe — I’m going to stop putting book chapters up on the site. Of course, if any of you would like to volunteer to edit drafts along the way, let me know.

Beth also says:

Readers need to support these efforts by buying the works of writers they read and admire on the web, perhaps using more of their book-buying dollars for short-run books and chapbooks, and using the library more for mass-market titles.

I couldn’t agree more. Her small press, Phoenicia Publishing, has just released Odes to Tools, a collection of poetry by our friend Dave Bonta. You should pick up a copy. And we still have copies of Walking With Zeke available for sale as well.

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From the Center for Biological Diversity:

LAS VEGAS— In response to a petition and lawsuit from the Center for Biological Diversity and other environmental and faith-based groups, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced today that a population of the greater sage grouse found in the Mono Basin of California and Nevada warrants protection under the Endangered Species Act, but that such protection is precluded due to lack of resources.

“Continued delay of protection for the Mono Basin population of sage grouse is a recipe for extinction,” said Rob Mrowka, an ecologist at the Center. “To date, the Obama administration has not improved on the Bush administration’s progress in providing protection to the nation’s most endangered species.”

During his eight-year tenure, Bush protected a mere 62 species, for a rate of fewer than eight species per year. This compares to 522 protected under Clinton, or 65 species per year, and 231 species protected under George H.W. Bush, or 58 species per year. With only two species listed so far, the Obama administration appears to have flatlined on listing. Under the Endangered Species Act, the Fish and Wildlife Service can only delay protection of species if it is making expeditious progress listing other species considered a higher priority for listing.

“Delaying protection for Mono Basin sage grouse is clearly illegal and irresponsible,” said Mrowka.

The Mono Basin area population of sage grouse is the southwestern-most population of the greater sage grouse and is geographically isolated from other sage grouse populations. It is found in Storey, Carson, Douglas, Mineral, and Esmeralda counties in Nevada and in Mono, Alpine, and Inyo counties in California. “Because the Mono Basin population of sage grouse exists at the periphery of the sage grouse range and is genetically unique, it contains characteristics that may well be critically important to the survival of the species as a whole, particularly in light of climate change,” said Mrowka.

Primary threats to Mono Basin sage grouse include degradation of habitat by livestock grazing and invasive noxious weeds, fragmentation of habitat caused by development, roads and transmission lines, ORV use, drought, and loss of sagebrush due to the encroachment of junipers. Sage grouse are also still hunted in Nevada and California. Populations have declined up to 70 percent.

Like other sage grouse, Mono Basin sage grouse are noted for their elaborate spring courtship rituals and displays. Males and females gather on traditional display areas called leks. Males strut, fan their tail feathers, and produce a haunting sound from air sacs located on the sides of their necks to attract willing females. An average of six to seven eggs are laid and incubated for around 30 days.

Related video:

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I’d heard something about this earlier today, and couldn’t bring myself to go look until just now.

Al Weisel, the brilliant writer behind the purportedly eponymous blog Jon Swift, has died.

“Jon” was consistently one of the kindest, most humane people in the progressive blog world. He got in touch with me a couple years back with a good word when my life was not at its most joyous, which meant a lot to me. He inhabited a realm online characterized almost entirely by shallow meanspiritedness — poking fun at the wingnuts — but he approached his writing with consistent humanity and kindness. Some of that was a deliberate schtick, of course, but it worked.

He will be missed.

I do hope we have made one small step on the road to healing between the left and right sides of the blogosphere. After all an ostrich needs both a left wing and a right wing to fly.

— “Jon Swift,” personal correspondence, May 23 2006

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