The stories spin, warp and weft through holes in a tablet, in my memory, others’ fingers spelling ram’s-horn patterns, the horn a reminder of the communal breath we no longer share. Tell me a story about a weaver, I asked the wind. “Only that a spider dropped its thread, too heavy with ash to sieve for flies.” This fire season, I see hummingbirds rising like sparks, their nests dusted with soot from those webs.
Lead Mines, Clough, Rivington UK, Gary Gray, Date Unknown
The excavation’s long since stalled out. Digging the sough, I mean. “To mine the lead, we need to draw the water table down, to draw the water down we need to dig, but the picks were left behind, were lost, and so am I.” There’s a shallow ditch, or the shape left behind where you fell. Oh. Oh. This geology, these mines, clay under my fingernails that smells like the last kiss I gave you—atop your head as you dozed at the computer, blue-gray light from the screen like a caul, wrapping us both. But I left the room to go to bed, and you, my dear, fell, then crawled, then left, and still I can’t drain this sough.
By Gurdeepdali - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
It points towards the center of gravity of the earth, which is grief, or iron. Not lead, despite the weight I feel at the center of my chest telling me otherwise. I don’t think a person can build something true and square without a plumb-line, though—even when the pointing towards the gravity of grief, the burrows where its small cousins live (little creatures without names, blind and scrabbling for grubs in their dark dens) leaves me raddled and hollowed out. A weak field spun up by my fingertips to sing for you, for us, along the wire—loss trued up, pulled towards the iron heart of things, spin and stasis, magnetic at the core.
The apples that have traveled further in two weeks than I have in two months tell me stories: how the pollen-dusted bees tumbled in their flowers, how the growers counted out their pennies to pay for the right to grow them—apples piled into great wooden boxes where they slept, strapped to a truck bed, snug over macadam, dreaming of earthworms fat and red as bud-break on the currant.
Timothy Knepp, "Redear Sunfish," 2008
It once was true, and true it shall ever be. The cattails, taller than I was, obstructing my view. The rusty old rowboat, with its creaky oarlocks. My grandma, gently pulling the oars as we made our way through the reeds and cattails, fishing.
It was summer (it had to have been summer, I was maybe seven, maybe eight, so I was in school if not for summer), and we’d go up to Rockland Lake, and my parents would visit with cousins and aunts and family friends, and I’d go with my grandma on adventures.
She showed me how to put a worm on the hook. Oh, how it struggled, the poor slimy red thing, roiling between my fingers. I couldn’t do it, so she did it for me.
She’d bait her hook too, and we sat in the rowboat near the lily pads and cattails, watching the red-and-white plastic floats bob a little on the riffle.
Until the float popped under! “Pull back a little - gently!” I tried to set the hook, and it didn’t seem to set, and when I reeled in there was half a worm left on the hook, and no fish.
She helped me put a new worm on, and cast off again. We sat, together, on the water, in the green-and-rust smelling boat, in the warm sunlight. She smelled faintly of perfume and laundry and cotton cloth. I was her cub, she was my lioness, showing me how to hunt, keeping me safe while I learned.
Her float ducked under! She set the hook and, like magic, like something from a fairy-tale, she reeled in a small iridescent rainbow, pan-shaped, a sunfish. It was a keeper. And then my float popped under, and she helped me tug back to gently set the hook, and we reeled it in together, and it was a perch, a yellow perch. It, too, was a keeper.
She caught one more panfish, and I helped her row us back to the dock. Later, at the bungalow, she skinned and gutted the little fish as I watched in raw fascination and horror, deboned them, minced the meat.
That night, we all ate home-made gefilte fish. The golden light of the day passed into night, and me and my brothers and little cousins were tucked into our cots, and I fell asleep.
Safe, and fed, and full of the day. It once was true, and true it shall ever be.
Daucus Carota, photographer unknown, 2006
If it wasn’t for that neural trick no stories could make their way from lips to ear, or from then to now. I couldn’t conjure myself at six, at ten, my heart open to the queen anne’s lace and its amethyst heart at the center of the umbrel; couldn’t recall the fear, the bloody wet ruby of my skinned knee. Limping home, crying for my dad to help me after I fell off my bike. He was there, gathered me up, cleaned and dressed the wound, wiped my tears. And now he’s neither there nor here, he’s dust, and the child I was tells me a story I need to hear (of course he fell short, of course, but it’s also so simple and good—just a child, bleeding stopped, tears dried). Z"L, what’s written as we murmur their names, our beloved dead.
Louis Daguerre, Plaster casts, Société française de photographie, 1837
Ahead, approaching, some stranger comes walking, loose-limbed and arms swinging wide— that silhouette, shadow-play brushing a scuffle, a soft shoe, a memory. Familiar, unfamiliar, the stride—they grow taller, elongate, and I catch myself, my self. It’s me, it’s my shadow blocking the light, as liquid and dark as ink from the well. My harbinger twin, spilling stories I can’t yet tell.
Reese Derrenberger, "Fig," 2008
The memory of sweetness, hollowed out. It stopped me, as I bent to pry up milk-sapped spurge from a fissure in the drive (for what? it won’t save the spalled concrete)—a ruin of what was once a honey bee, its head excavated, sightless, resting near a broken thorax, an empty abdomen. When I went to look again after weeding, it was gone. I felt as if I’d misplaced a letter sent by an old friend, then misplaced not just the letter, but the empty envelope, the blue-and-white Chinese porcelain dish where I’d set it, that I’d even misplaced the memory of paper sacks full of sweet honey figs still warm from his garden.
Angelina Earley, "Vertigo," 2009
As I lay these words down I wish each were a wooden slat bound up by strong rope—maybe made from twisted vines, or yucca fiber rolled into cord across our thighs, across all the days it takes to make a line long enough to find you. Each word pierced for the rope, tied up and tossed through the air, I’d watch them extend as if they were my own hands arms spine ribs stretching out to you, towards a place so wholly unknown. Listening to where they catch, to where we each tie up, both of us at the end of every arc of our single stories now suspended and made new, as we both place our trust that these words will hold us safely until we can hold one another.
Diego Delso, "Geysers of Tatio, San Pedro de Atacama, Chile," 2016
My footprints have been swept clean away by the wind. Do I know where I am? Yes, I know. I am here. I am lost. And the sun is high in its arc, its shadows cast black as pips on white dice, the dice I tossed when I set forth, Audaces fortuna iuvat. Mouth as dry as the scree on this downslope. I wonder, now, if Virgil made a bleak joke in giving those words to a man who loses and dies. We all die. In dying, lose touch. The talus slope underfoot shifts, slides— and I lose touch with where, how I began.
John Rusk, "Trillium chloropetalum," 2014
Darkness is almost absolute in the understory. Here, where I don’t cast a shadow, where the Catherine wheel of needled branches breaks the winter sunlight on its way down, bleeds it of warmth til it’s frayed and pale as mycelium. Near where summer’s wildfires stained our lips with tarry soot, made it impossible to speak.
But this is how we’re born, from this darkness. Juncos tell me seeds have burst their jackets so they must fly towards higher ground, the rising wind lifting them like samaras above the earth, away, away—and here, love, the understory’s long night is now starred with white trillium, a scent that pitches me headlong into bud-break.
"As Earth spins, its shape is slightly flattened into an ellipsoid, so that there is a greater distance between the centre of Earth and the surface at the equator, than the centre of Earth and the surface at the poles. This bigger distance, coupled with the rotation of Earth, results in the force of gravity being weaker at the equator than at the poles."
The shape of the world: pushed down by its spin, “a flattened ellipsoid.” As if a potter’s wet hands, while centering clay on the wheel, let the rotation take over, as if they stepped away to get a fresh cup of tea, as if the spinning clay gathered a wisp of the earth’s magnetic field to itself— a cloud condensing, a blanket against the solar wind—and made an atmosphere. As if the potter returned as a goddess, a geologist or mathematician, the maker re- making, remade by the shape of the world.
Takeuchi Seihō, Spring Snow (Shunsetsu), 1942
The crow with a broken primary feather limping up the drive, angling for a cheese cracker. Or the neighbor’s fat chickens, bringing death to grubs. A week ago, two puddles of thickening blood on the porch; later, while weeding, I saw a sack, no, the pink hairless remains of a rat, under lavender. I’m tangled up in other people’s stories about the end of things. They’re frayed, threadbare stories, having no crow, no chickens, no grubs, no rat, yet they nettle me. Lilliputian thread, cobwebs from a dead god’s crypt; I shudder as they brush my face.
"Artemis of Ephesus." Statue from the Amphitheater of Lepcis Magna, photograph by Marco Prins.
In early spring, the white flowering currant. Artemis Ephesia, egg-breasted Lady pale as the moon, as the marble under your lost paint, when bud-break came, did your followers sit at your feet, drowsy as bees in torpor? I lean close, bend towards the pendant blossoms. Couldn’t be indecorum in this wet land, it’s the same sweet scent as blood-red sanguineum.
(OvO), "The trees have eyes and they've gathered to watch our fleeting lives," 2013
My gaze, beloved, doesn’t hold fast any longer. It flickers like a hummingbird’s tongue, nystagmus kissing the snowdrops as I bend to look close, so close extra gravity tugs at me, softens the ground underfoot. I catch myself, widen my stance but it’s too late, I’m set down in mulch and mud, breathing in what the wood chips exhale—lignin, resin, vanillin, my nose in the book of shredded trees. It’s a blur, this life, rising on the wind, falling at moonset, and I still look to touch it mid-flight, to steady my gaze.
Daniel Beilinson, "Khimki Forest," 2011
We’d starve if we couldn’t stomach the bitterness. Even after a soak, that cold stream hadn’t washed out enough from acorn and oak to unbind the tongue, but we must eat. (Our hard-times bread not much more than a mush, but oh how we lapped up its flint edge.) Flux may kill us? Then we’ll take our water pink with wine. (The recipe calls for more than Kore’s six seeds to ferment a blood red prairie Lethe. Husks added for a tannic brace, a taste of exile.) We’d die if we fed ourselves with all we thought we knew, who we thought we were, those sweet easy times before— and we’ll die if we ever, finally, forget them.
zeevveez, "Gnat Balls (2)," 2013
Every day, about an hour before sunset, a cloud of small insects floats, Brownian and swirling, near the apex of an invisible pyramid (the base, a complex alignment of dahlias, catmint, three red flowering currants; the edges, outlined by shadows cast from a small ash tree). They’ll dance, then disperse. Their beautiful anonymity is my conceit (I’m not meant to listen to their olfactory small talk), their spiraling without touching an artifact of my line of sight (I’m certain they’ll touch, why else dance?)—profligate geometries, purpose unknown, life-giving, nourishing delight.
I whisper my apologies to the dead sotto voce, here where moss and lichens mottle more than one child’s name. Is it common courtesy or superstition, to ask those buried for forgiveness as I walk on their graves? Is it something that can be forgiven, that I find beauty in the way the rain dissolves a death date carved in stone, in how spores latch on and bloom, life latticing across the markers, dissolving all remembrance into forgetting?
I’m a tarpit into which every moment falls— sunlight raking across bricks and into broken windows of a warehouse along the Hudson; that bramble thorn piercing the cupid’s bow of my lip, kissing me bloody when I was seven; the gauze of my great-grandmother’s cotton dress as I tried to dodge her bristly kisses. (All week, all I hadn’t known I’d remembered has bubbled up like methane through bitumen.) I’m an asphalt seep, a dark iridescence where an infinite number of memories have massed and caught fire, thin flames licking my skin.
Photo by Kevin Faccenda
Where I live, the alder leaves are dropping— banked sunlight paid up from longer days, fugitive gold weighting them down until, at the first north wind, they give up their grip. But I’ve gone somewhere else, gone to an open-air memory palace, those mud sloughs framed with live oak that won’t shed until spring. Instead of leaves, gulf fritillaries and hackberry emperors tumble on past, updraft and down, dusting the same air that’ll carry me over remembered land—monarch paths through the chaparral, swallowtails flitting though mountain passes—until I’m home.
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