Red ink sundew (Drosera erythrorhiza) in Lesueur National Park, September 2021, Calistemon, 2021
A paper cut, then a dark red bead—heme, the color of rust or a bookkeeper’s debits. The oxidizing wick lit from lungs to toes so we can burn, then burn what’s left on our funeral pyres. Living has its costs—debts that can’t be repaid, all I can do to rebalance those books is to ask forgiveness. Still it’s not enough to lift the stain.
Overhead. The sky, not needing payment, opens its treasure to me.
Your voice, imagine it—held in a conch shell, or in the damp cold breath of an unformed wish.
What would it take to speak despite a cut throat, or with lungs fully soaked and drowning?
This is where we meet, then—this place where there’s no air, soundlessly mouthing the syllables for “beloved” since we’ve long forgotten our names.
To bite down on the very thing itself that gives shape to our sounds, voice to our breath? Holding the idiom close one would think what we’d say was so powerful, it required warding off in a deliberate act of self-harm—and yet the bite is most often accidental. O Friend, my wish: please let it shape every syllable, every blessing and chant you need to nourish yourself, and if you bite your tongue let it not be to hold back, let it be no accident, but rather a gift of Buddha-heart as it greets your Buddha-nature—“Che le sa, che le sa.”
The gray sparkling dust on the charnel ground I’d made. The conceit I had, saying a prayer for each one I killed, sending it off with an om mani peme hung and wishes for it to be reborn into a better life. It saddened me, killing those things, and yet I saw no way out of it. The birdseed was alive with moth larvae, the wrappers pierced and riddled. Even after cleaning out the pantry, more moths. And so, my mindfulness for the first dozen larvae, for their suffering as I crushed them, then the next few dozen, each time the blessing given wearing thinner, thinner through my breath until what had been a blessing became a curse, until I gave up the pretense, killed them with predatory pleasure. I didn’t want them to suffer yet gave no mercy, no more prayers, no thought to their pain.
Their gift to me: to see myself clearly, this hollow reed ingesting and excreting, my sentience mere paint on a wrapper of chemical processes ending with my teachers’ guts and broken wings dotting the kitchen walls, oxidizing in the afternoon sun.
1. Drawing a nude model (oh no not naked, we say “nude” and I never thought to ask why) I was taught to seek the open spaces—as one example, the soft triangle made by the inner elbow and bottom of the rib cage, arms akimbo. We called it “negative space,” a way of seeing that’d flatten a whole person, turn them into an object, the openings around their life fixed in place like butterflies pinned by this gestural, analytical thinking that empties me.
2. I didn’t much care for exploring the steep sandstone ravines near our campsite; too much risk a storm miles off would bring flash floods, trap us there. (I have some fear of drowning, even in the desert.)
3. Your cupped hands create a tinaja for the rainfall that fell from the faucet. The blessing of plumbing, of brazing to join the pipes; astonishment at your body’s everyday movement and ease, its grace. Is it any wonder I love watching you as you bend towards the sink, set the water flowing, palms held to receive that gift?
4. The joy of this world—there are no empty places, everything is full of energy and life— is equally its horror. The biome of the gut, the hollow tube that pierces us. Archipelagos where the most violent exchanges occur at microscopic scale, whose tiny denizens first preserve us, and then, at last, consume us.
5. There’s a shallow valley on the bed that’s still warm, where the sunlight’s pooling, where your presence is felt in absence. It’s spring, now, it won’t be long before the bumblebees lose their balance, tumbling down off the flowering currant. The way I lose my balance, tipsy on all this sweetness.
1. Summer heat, a distant memory at the end of March in Portland. And even further back, the desiccation of Phoenix. I’d wake to rust on my pillow from nosebleeds; lips cracking, stinging from sweat as I tried to restart the car. Both of us overheated, stalled from vapor lock.
2. Learning Spanish. The verb “to drink,” beber, a softening edge to the “b” through my breath, voicing sound through the narrowest opening— a turbulent flow. Scrying my future, when will thirst drive me to rummage through ALL my lost words, surprising myself when I produce Quiero bebo as if from a magician’s pocket?
3. The sadness sits within my chest and purrs. It weighs more than my heart, than Ma’at’s feather of truth, and in this way I know my restlessness is a marker of the danger I’m in. At any unlucky moment, Ammit could gobble it up: my pulsing, chambered soul.
4. If I had a pocket knife, I’d play mumblety-peg. If I had a pocket knife, I’d whittle up a whistle. If I had a pocket knife, I’d need to cut a switch. I threw away my pocket knife, tossed it in the river where it sank like a stone, fresh blood on the blade calling a flathead catfish close.
5. The path is broken chert, the silver thread of a creek shallow enough to wade. The path’s that faint scar on the palm of your left hand, cut while chopping onions. What I’d wish for is safe passage; what I have is anything but.
1. I thought I’d be pulling thick mats of wapato from my backyard bog, but there were no rhizomes, few bulbs. What clung to the digging fork’s tines—rotting burlap sacks I’d forgotten, jute now sodden, snake-like. (On the other side of the world, stone-faced Medusa and her snakes rest underwater in the Basilica Cistern.)
2. The shudder, as tendrils of eelgrass wrap around my ankles. It’s the touch of something I cannot see, something benthic by me, that makes me pull away. (Coney Island, when I was six. Sharp sand scoured abrasions on my feet, and when I ran to meet the gray-green foam at the swash-edge, the salt burned.)
3. (There is a place where time dilates, the way a cat’s eyes do when its gaze is suddenly fixed on a moth. There is a place where time cleaves into all its aggregate parts, sedimentary, granular. There is a place where “when” and “then” and “now” drain of all meaning, the way a vortex drains a too-full lake.)
4. The skull spider, above my bed, is hunting. Legs thinner than an eyelash, longer than my index finger, a slow herky-jerky measure across the ceiling. Does it see me? I can’t say, but discuss with myself whether or not to kill it. Whether or not it will scuttle down the wall, tangle in my hair. (I leave it, dream I'm grafting trees.)
5. Asked, and answered, with tenderness. What is it I wanted? To be brave enough to be weak, have the courage of a field mouse as it waits, so still, hoping the sparrowhawk will miss. To ask for what I wanted. First to ask myself (and hope not to break upon the question), then you. Drowning in fear; kissed back to breath.
