Selections from recent books….
Here is an except from Salad Only Devil that ran on The Common, Amherst College
https://www.thecommononline.org/tag/Charles-hood/
From “I Heart Ugly Nature” in A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat
[ In this passage, I am talking about where I work and live, a desert north of Los Angeles ]
It has a bad rep, the Antelope Valley. Everything is a bit beat up here, a bit second-rate. The Antelope Valley is the place where old sofas crawl to the end of dirt roads to die. Fame touches the Antelope Valley rarely, though Tom Selleck was part-owner of a shopping plaza and came out to cut the ribbon. In the 1920s, Judy Garland’s family had a house here; it later became a homeless shelter and then was gutted by fire. Frank Zappa grew up here and that should count for something, but once he got out, he refused to come back, not even when offered a pile of money to give a single speech. In Africa I was once asked if the antelope in my valley were good to eat. Yes, and in fact so good that we ate them all. Even the Pacific Crest Trail goes around the valley instead of crossing it, sticking to the high ground like a matron avoiding a load of spilled manure.
Even my dog Lucy was a rescue from the pound, and bless her, but she’s a bit of a muddle. She is afraid of sneezes and all aspects of carrots, and as a corgi-shepherd-lemur mix, her legs are too short while her butt is too long. Due to various dental mishaps, she has fewer teeth than the average cast member in Tiger King. She can’t decide if she wants to play with pigeons or eat them, and any puddle, no matter how fetid, clearly exists only to be waded into and sampled deeply. If there is a passing siren, one must stop and howl—I am expected to join in as well—and anything peed on during the outbound half of a journey has to be marked again twice as vigorously on the return leg, just to be sure the territorial claims have not gone stale in the intervening hour. She would prefer some assistance from me in this, but Lucy understands solidarity has its limits.
from Wild Sonoma
All ecosystems start with the same ingredients: water and soil. As we look around us, we can see a million years laid out at once. Every hill and creek is the result of geology dancing with rainfall, and that geology is a nonstop parade of churning, grinding, lifting, and folding. There are cobbles in the drabbest, scrubbiest backyard that first started out as a diaphanous cloud of silt slowly settling on the floor of a warm, shallow sea, many millions of years ago. Other layers of sediment pressed down on top of that—at first resting as lightly as a duvet on top of a feather mattress—and then over time, magic happened: silt became mud, mud became sandstone, and sandstone got subducted under a rising tectonic plate, heated, melted, and made anew. Nature is the ultimate recycler: a clot of mud washed into an ancient sea ends up as cut and dressed stone turned into walls to terrace the soil that grows our grapes. The rock we skip across a pond today will sink to the bottom, but it won’t be there forever. Some future morning it will be on the top of a mountain or buried deep under a tectonic plate, on its way to melting back into magma and re-emerging somewhere else. We walk on the roof of time with each and every step.
from A Californian’s Guide to the Mammals Among Us
a section from “North American Porcupine, Erethizon dorsatum”
All hail the quill pig (to celebrate one of its folk names). Porcupines are large, solitary, plant-grazing, tree-bark-gnawing rodents; ours is the northernmost member of a diverse South American family. As fabulous as the local one is, in the jungle some are even better: they are gold and black and have prehensile tails. Porcupines are also found in the Old World; a North African species was introduced into Italy by the Romans.
In California the porcupine’s range includes mountains and river valleys in the northern half of the state (including the peaks of Death Valley), but they are not found in Angeles Crest, San Diego, or the Channel Islands.
The body almost seems like a prank or hoax—what do you get when you cross a skunk with a cactus?—yet this is one stout little tank, with 30,000 quills and a body that weighs up to 25 pounds. Porcupines rustle or even sort of clack when they walk, and if you find a shed quill on the ground it is strangely light and yet fiercely sharp—imagine a knitting needle that weighs less than a soda straw yet tapers to a point sharper than a tranquilizer dart.
from the book Partially Excited States
The Wand Chooses the Wizard
the same way the gat chooses the thug
the shiv chooses the stoodge,
the baton chooses the policeman
and the arrow chooses the saint.
No, the wand chooses the wizard
while the patsy chooses the mark
and the floozy chooses the lug,
Manischewitz chooses the wino
and the trailer park chooses the tornado
FEMA will take two years to process.
Even now, the town looks like a cartoon
prizefighter missing half his teeth.
The wand chooses the wizard in Afghanistan
while the .338 Lapua Magnum B408 bullet
capable of a confirmed kill at 2,707 yards
chooses the sniper. The new surfboard
chooses the ten-year-old and the ten-year-old,
now in his twenties, about to win the Gold Coast
Pro Surfing Contest in Australia, chooses
the shark. No, the book chooses the reader
the way the brook chooses the fisherman,
the triple axel chooses the skater,
the Vera Wang dress chooses bride.
The husband waits, choosing silk boxers.
The book is tired of you now,
has chosen somebody else.
You will never know how it ends.
The wand chooses the wizard
but this poem has chosen you, only you,
and it is still choosing you, even now.
This poem was always going to pick you
and it will never change its mind.