Asymptosy

New fruiting bodies pop up from my compost
heap of language, like this one—asymptote—
and I’m torn between putting it in my basket,
or leaving it to shake its fungal head and toss
spores windward. Oh, okay then, I’ll reach for
the word. But slow. Slower. Hand ever closer
but not. Quite. Grasping it, at all—a geometer
I’m not. Yet there are other paths. Desire, like
an asymptote, is “always approaching, never
arriving;” but even a spore will find its way to
germinate, once it’s blown clear of the graph.

Tagetes lucida

It’s a Western plant, all right. The only thing Old World
about this little scruffy shrub has been grafted onto its
name: Tages, the prophet who appeared at plow-time
and taught the Etruscans divination, who’d brought light
alongside him within the anise-scented leaves. But his
influence in the New World is limited. The Guatemalan
and Mexican grandmothers have ideas of their own as
to what to do with this gift, and there’s not much use
for an old prophet from another place and time when
their santos live now, know them each by name. Folks
to heal, children to nurse, meat roasting: old Tages must
sit outside the jacal until the grannies call him to help.

Play

Horia Varlan, "Crude chalk drawing of a boat," 2008.

All children draw, if they have a way to do so.
Chalk on a sidewalk; a rock small enough to fit
a little hand, hard enough to scratch away the
desert varnish from a cliff; a stick in wet sand.
Now we are older, you and I, and carry caveats
in our pockets instead of the treasures we’d
find in the woods. But still, still, I sometimes
palm a piece of flint and leave a mark for you
on the soft limestone: a little sun or a heart,
ready to fill with a trickle from the seep that
softens the caliche; play, to guide you home.

Construction

The tensioned rebar remembers the furnace, and the
furnace remembers its refractory bricks. This garage,
its nested voids skinned in cast concrete, remembers
the weeds that once patched the alkaline soil: a caliche
blanket snatched away before the garage could dream.

The interlocked slabs that make the garage an empty
vessel are kin to those cast alongside the highway. At
dusk, those flat planes lay open like palms to a fortune-
teller, the seams like lifelines waiting to be traced by a
patterned, rusted finger. This evening, a visitor: a lone
woman dancing slow, measured flamenco arabesques;
her boot-heels stamp out a rock-dust duende, consoling
the weeping concrete for what it can no longer dream.

Meadowlark

Photo by Alex Galt/USFWS, 2015.

A slow walk along piled riprap that’s holding back
the waters. Is it an embankment for an earthen dam,
or the lip of an ancient monster’s water-jug, half-
buried in an avalanche of oyster shells cast off after
feasting, still sharp underfoot? Both could be true.
I listen as the wind stuffs my ears with a dizzy racket:
rattle of blown cattail spikes, gimlet-eyed grackles’
whistlings. Then a gift at my feet, perfect, unmoving—
a sulphur butterfly, legs folded, not long dead. I’m
its only mourner, in the absence of a meadowlark.

V. Meurent

Source image: "Ferns at the Royal Melbourne
Botanical Gardens" by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos

Unwinding myself. Much like the string that
makes nautiloid arcs in the geometers’s texts,
I’m pulled just tight enough to sing if stroked.
“Let’s practice drawing involutes freehand!”
I’d say, and you’d reply with a smile, pointing
towards a fern uncurling at our bare feet. It’s
not an involute curve, true, but this soft green
volute unwinds us out; its center so far from
the geometer, so very close to where we lay.

Model

Édouard Manet, "Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe," 1862-63.

Not a simulacrum, sitting here wearing
nothing except your gaze on my skin,
but the X-factor in the work: it can’t be
done without me. The room smells like
turps, linseed oil, wooden stretcher bars,
and sweat. Those single-pane windows
sieve the light, let in the cold, but I don’t
feel the chill. A galaxy of hot lamps circle
me like little suns, put me at the center
of this universe where I’m neither subject
nor object, but co-author: the one not
holding the brush, the one who embodies
the question of what’s being, and what’s
represented, in that fresh, gliding stroke.

Trivia

Liz West, "Junk Drawer," 2013.

It’s like a junk drawer in here, full of
obscure treasures, broken toys, books
I’d forgotten (whether to read them or
what I’d read, well, I forget that too.)
I reach in, back to the back, and find
there is no end to it. The drawer goes
on, the cabinet deepens, and I grow
smaller, lever myself up by brass pulls
and fall in. Socks make a soft landing.

Forty questions later, the jinn pause,
wait to hear what I’ll say in response
to the next question. That question is
the one unasked: the one to which the
only answer is laughter and joy, here
in the endless junk drawer of memory
where the jinn circle our stories, glow,
burn without charring bits of our lost
childhood, the forts in the forest, all
the fine trivia and pocket-lint of love.

Awl

Peacock feather on the ground

You can’t stitch together what’s not been pierced,
and these memories do pierce me. I bind them up,
chain-sewn through the piercings, and think about
those scraps of Moroccan leather you had tooled
with an awl—what a beautiful, wine-dark cover
they’d have made for this retelling of our stories.

Except we didn’t really tell stories, did we? No, we
sat together, dug Johnson grass out of your garden
together, watched the late afternoon light as it left
gold coins strewn on your living room rug, together.

My friend, my friend, it always seems that if I had
the right set of tools, I could take that lock, finesse
it open, that lock that keeps thee from me. But I
don’t, I can’t. And anyway, you’d laugh and tell me
to get outside where the rain lilies are blooming,
use that dull awl to punch holes in the caliche, plant
some lily seeds and some fresh, feathered dreams.

Cascarones

"Easter Morning: Battle of the Cascarones," Arianne, 2011.

They say that Marco Polo brought the idea
of cascarones from China back to Venice, but
if he did, what might have been the reason?
Surely the Venetians knew how to pitch woo
without needing to toss perfume-filled eggs
at their lovers. Regardless, cascarones are here
now, having travelled from Italy to Spain to
Mexico to San Antonio to my neighbors’ homes,
these tissue-papered eggs of love & luck filled
with confetti that teases and marks the beloved
at every breakage. So if cascarones were a poem,
what would they mean? “It’s good luck to break
a fragile thing”? No, I doubt that. I’ll go with this:
“Love plays with you, marks you, gets in your hair.”

Patrimony

Tilda Dalunde, "Collecting toes
(In case of emergency)"

This is where we place the fingertips
of the children we lost to sharp knives,
to guns, to bombs. See, they fit so neatly
in rows in this vestibule, these dusky blue
reminders of what’s become so broken.
Such tiny fingernails. The crescent moon
in each is receding, as if it’s drifting far,
far away, taking a child with it, over the
fence that surrounds the pocked yard,
up past the clouds. The light’s gone out,
it’s been shot out, the shrinking moon
hiding its face behind those fingertips.

Improvisation

From Otto Wilhelm Thomé,
"Flora von Deutschland, Österreich
und der Schweiz." 1885, Gera,
Germany, via Biblio.

The log in the middle of the creek
doesn’t seem firmly seated; neither
am I, leaning out over loose rolling
gravel for a better idea of how to
cross. There’s the balance point: a
place where the shadow beneath
the broken trunk underlines the
soggy bark, scribes the creek-bed.
No gap, but it’s off-center enough
to need me to be light-footed, a
barefoot dancer on what’d pivot
and throw me. I don’t trust my
body, don’t trust that I can be
single-minded enough to commit
with sufficient speed and grace.
I waver then wind moves the cane
nearby, telling me how it could
be done: first, cut a stalk almost
twice my height, tie my shoes to it.
Then take off my socks, put them
in my shoes, step up and, balance
pole low and in hand, let bare feet
read the bark while I keep my gaze
moving from horizon to log and
back. My shadow is an elongated
asterisk on the water below as I
find my footing, one step after an
unsteady other, until I look down
and see I’ve finally crossed.

Semiplume

We saw the hunter before we saw
the pheasant—a man far off down
the trail, bright orange hat, rifle in
hand, walking towards us. Then we
saw the bird. It stepped deliberately
near and ahead of us, towards the
hunter and directly along an invisible
line between where we came from
and where the hunter was heading,
as if we three, my brother and I and
the pheasant, had gone for a stroll
together, the pheasant a friend of the
family taking a slow constitutional with
us after dinner. My brother waved at
the hunter, to be sure we—not just
the bird—had been seen. We had.
We got a measured nod, as if to both
acknowledge us and to compliment
the pheasant on its skill, and then the
hunter abruptly veered off the trail;
a dog, his dog, had found something
to flag in the brush. A sharp exhale (I’d
been holding my breath), and then a
look down at a tangle of soft color.
I'd found a scattered handful of torn
feathers—stiff contour feathers and
downy semiplumes—from another
pheasant. There was a small smear
of blood at the base of one shaft. I
looked up at my brother just in time
to see our friend startle, dart away.

Afterimage

A reconstruction of the Palaikastro Kouros, from
"Resurrecting a Lost Minoan God," Billings Gazette,
October 2008.

If you sit and fix your attention on him, this
youthful god shaped from ivory and beaten
gold, you might forget he’d been shattered,
burnt, buried in a midden, forgotten. Keep
looking: keep your eyes open long enough,
for hours or days, and when you look away,
the god will still be with you—no longer a
dead god in chryselephantine, but alive in
dark midnight blue, a vision of the dancing
Krishna floating in the Minoan afterimage.

Silhouette

Brocken Inaglory, "Fog Shadow on Golden Gate Bridge," 2006.

I’ve been chasing light for ages. That gold-edged
blue just before the sun shimmied up? It slipped
through my fingers like a hatchling minnow. I’ve
waited in the shadows of a thunderhead to ravel
out fat skeins of crepuscular rays, only to come
home empty-handed; the light’s just too fast for
me, for anyone, really. (Once, though, I found if I
walked slower than my shadow could move, light
might press up behind me, kiss and silhouette me.)

Hydromel

The Aberdeen Bestiary, Folio 63r,
"Bees make honey and skillful hives"

The bees have been busy, as, well, you know;
their fanny-packs full of gold pollen, bellies all
swollen and tight as bodhrán drumheads from
a surfeit of nectar. They’re fat; it’s time to bring
smoke to the hive, set them to drowsing, pry a
frame out and open their wax-sealed treasures
to pour into new vessels: 5-to-1 water to honey,
boil and skim, cool it down, yeast it, wait for it a
few weeks 'til it begins to dance and hum the way
bees do, the way fingers tapping the bodhrán do,
the way we will do once that hydromel's tapped.

Instructions

"Flint Knapping" by Travis S. on Flickr

Since those curled keratin shards
could be magicked, they must be
buried deep: dig a hole to China,
put your waxing crescent moons
at the bottom of that earth, cover
them up. But if the ground’s dry
and hard, it works as well to plant
two seedlings on the parings (for
example, one knockout rose that’s
seraph-red, one plumbago cherub-
blue), then gather chert left after
planting. If you’re lucky, you’ll find
two fine-grained stones to fit the
palm of your hand, ready, waiting
to make a flint-knapped heart.

Amphibious

The sky’s the color of a raw oyster, shucked and
glistening, as I pick my way down quicksilvered
steps, moving into deeper water. A current wicks
up from my ankles to knees to thighs to belly;
I’m half in, half out when a bandy-legged swimmer,
small as a leaf, darts away. Being of a place and
time together, we’re somewhat kin; I wish it would
stay and tell me a story, but no. This isn’t a fairytale
where a tiny frog coughs up a magical scroll—it’s
a place where the wind plays with my hair, where
the pool cossets me, where whorls on my fingertips
make the trails I follow—ten small labyrinths water-
logged, wrinkling. I touch, then pull up on the ladder
out, re-entering the maze of what world I can grasp.

Sluice

Joseph Mallord William Turner, excerpt
from "River Scene, with Carpenters at Work
Mending a Sluice," The Tate

You’d need to make an appointment to sit
with the sketch Turner made of carpenters
mending a sluice (faint tangles of graphite
laid on paper that still exhales vanillin and
lignin and lead)—but you can look online,
dream about locks, and flow, and the now-
unseen green of the countryside that day
he made it. We’re still in drought here, but
I can feel the monsoon coming. The sluice
gates are open—I can see the acequias, the
wells, the aquifers at last are starting to fill.

Brushfire

Photo by Andrea Booher, FEMA Photo Library, via Wikimedia Commons.

We can smell the smoke from here, and ash
has powdered the hood of the car. It’s all that
fuel left from years of drought that’s burning;
the shredded cedar, tufts of grass tangled up
with horseweed like hair in a comb, one spark
and it all catches. At night, burning bindweed
smolders then glows red, winks out: a field of
fuses that outlines the firebreak’s dark erasure,
a break too narrow to stop the spread.

Écorché

Wax male anatomical figure, Italian, 1776-1780,
Science Museum, London, Wellcome Images.

It’s an additive process, this rendering
what seems flayed so we can understand
the missing surface better. Each soft
scrape of wax pressed against the armature
like a kiss (red for muscle, yellow for tendon
and ligament, white for bone) brings me
closer to a graveyard fact: it’s the surface
that often falls away first, that same
surface through which we learn pain,
comfort, closeness, isolation. Oh my dear
dead teachers, anatomists and artists who
broke the seal of skin in your hunt for bone-
deep truth, you’d be astonished at the sight
of me, your unrecognizable future: this woman
warming wax between her fingers, adding on,
slowly building up her own body of work.

Dowsing

Russell Lee, "Water witch walks in the direction that stick heads him.
Pie Town, New Mexico," 1940, found via this article

I run a fingernail along that branching
witch-hazel, feeling for a thrum at every
Y. Yes, the answer comes, pick me, cut
here. My penknife slips as it bites in, and
I nick myself right at the moment I sever
branch from limb. A little blood wet on
the blade and the branch—a small give-
back to the brushy tree—and I’m almost
ready. I’ll be over there, over those hills,
walking the dry land, palms up and fingers
lightly wrapped around the Y as it calls
out down through rock, nods when the
water held in the branch is answered by
the water down below. No matter how
far off or deep, no matter how parched,
water will find water, the cut tree sings.

Passage

"Map with Ship," artist unknown, via Smithsonian Magazine

An airplane will skim the air like a flat stone, city to city.
We will be on it, in it, tiny limpets clinging to the stone.
An automobile will contain its small, smelly explosions
and nudge towards us, then open its doors, take us in.
We will be in it, then coughed up and out, undigested.
A building will lazily open its glass mouth; we’ll drift in.
We’ll sleep in its breath until morning, when it will yawn
and exhale us, tumble us through the wind to the edge
of a ship, to the edge of the sea, to await our passage.

Syrinx

Dust plume off the Canary Islands, by NASA

The wind makes neighbors of us all—music
from dry streets tamped by strangers’ feet,
from campsite radios, faint but overheard in
those Aeolian processes that lift a veil of dust
in North Africa, trailing gossamer above clouds
until sifting down, powdering the scrub oak in
Texas. Ash from wildfires lifts from the east,
stains our lungs west. Crackling alveoli, rales,
rhonchi sing overtones with each exhale: jet
streams kiss our mouths—a canebreak syrinx.

Cape May

Image from Google Maps.

We spent the whole day at the shore, sitting
on the seawall from sunrise to sundown, the
tide moving out then back in, as if it had to
run an errand mid-day. At low tide, we both
scrambled down the concrete ledge to look
for treasure: dull polished bottle-glass gems,
broken clamshells scoured to fit our fingers,
a chipped teacup half-buried in wet sand.
Later, at night, on the thin hotel room bed,
I felt the waves still moving within my body,
lulling me to sleep, carrying me out to sea.

Migrants

Frank Carey, Fort Union Cistern, 2011

It’s a dry season. My love, that limestone cistern
can’t store enough to see us through—there’s a
hairline crack, and it’s seeping. Frogs pluck songs
from mud near the crack, soft plectrum chirps,
singing “Cheer-up, cheer-up,” but I just can’t. I’ve
watched the sun beat them down into deep burrows,
turn what’s moist into a brittle tomb. Even snakes
are leaving, exits marked by acrid, cursive trails. It’s
a dry season, and it won’t end—the only thing left
is to walk through scrubland, to the edge of the sea.

Surfeit

The redbirds chit as they chase overhead—
dun-blush girl, blazoned boy. I was up before
they were, scuffling by a harvestman legging
his way (home? to hide?) and listening to my
breath. A jay, a jay yells and drops a feather
at my feet, then laughs: “Made you look!” To
begin under an ink-stained moon as crickets
and peepers shimmer, to end sweat-soaked,
breathless in gold light? Dayenu, surfeit of joy.

Summer Dirge

"Shrine at Covered Wells, Arizona" by Tillman

This bright forge has burnt my heart away.
My thoughts all charred by the sun, calcined
ribs crack as I breathe: too parched for tears,
I’m gutted. And look! Even in a grave, no cool
shade—it’s bleached by the white, hot sky.

Croton

We scrubby little things who do well
where it’s scraped earth and caliche
nod to each other. A squat of prairie
tea, a dash out then back by a spotted
whiptail lizard, a bustling caterpillar
hunter (Calosoma affine) as black as
the night I usually wander in, and me,
moving through the understory, the
slightest wind carrying the croton’s
homespun incense: resin and dust.

Iftar

Photograph by ESO/B. Tafreshi, 2012

This is the time we break our fast, when
the sun at last weakens and the waxing
moon rises. I reach into clouds, part the
darkness to take you, o pearl, o moon, in
my hands: an illusion, but your light on
my fingers is no less precious. The first
thing we must do in the dimming is to
slake our thirst; after the long burnt day,
I could drink the mountains dry of dew.

Botanical

Crinum Americanum L., by Alex Popovkin, Bahia, Brazil

I think about those people of mine, those who sewed
uncut gemstones into their hems as trader’s insurance,
those who went with slaves and brocade and sharp steel,
who brought back silk and aloes, those whose names I’ll
never know. Did the needle of loneliness prick them as they
embroidered their tales? Did it prick the way it does me, as
I stitch myself to a place by way of the names of flowers?

Scotoma

"Scotoma," Samira Yamin, Video Projection.

Look at the sun long enough, and all that’s left
is a scotoma of shadow and radiance - not the
face of a boy who was made to watch as you
murdered his family, not your own face (and who
would dare remember you as you’d been, when
once a child?) I know someone who told me the
things you’d done, and I laughed at how stupid
you were, thinking you could eat Death and live.
Is it so hard to believe the simplest mistake is what’s
left you blind now, thinking you’d gaze at the sun
through the darkest glass and steal its glory? You
who all those ghosts stalk, as your blindness grows.

Stalking

Red-Spotted Purple Butterfly, Jay Bock

It’s those little deaths piling up on my doorstep
that break me down. The mud-stained yellow of
a magnolia warbler, eye half-shuttered, one wing
broken and spilling bones; the now unreadable
parchment of what was once a house gecko. All
these small wild things stilled, and no witnesses
save for butterflies who’ve come to sip what’s left.
I’m fit for sadness small enough to carry in hand,
but know bigger grief waits patiently, stalking me.

Heat Lightning

"Heat Lightning near Louisville, Kentucky," B. Badgett, 2010

It’s five in the morning, and I’m moving through the
shadows in shadow by touch, unsteadily scuffling with
small ravines. A ghost – its spin axis a pale torso – drifts
past, trailing a sound like brushes on sand, gleaming for
a fraction of a second in the glint and shudder of heat
lightning. Storm’s so far off I can’t hear it, but it’s close
enough to press its gold coin into my eyes as it passes.

Tenderfoot

Sweat like nettles where I’ve chafed, the pointed burn
of a fire ant unhappy with my position in life, a rebuke
after dinner: I’m so thin-skinned, tears abrade as they
well up, sting as they dampen my cheeks. It’s the heat
of the day, of some moment clinging to itself, you say;
but I know it’s the broken shards cutting underfoot after
we brought the hammer down on this shell of a world.

Havdalah

The damp air becomes a spicebox as I walk between
floods. The smell of rotting Johnson grass, retted blades
waving from beneath piles of brush like some drowned
Ophelia; the last star jasmine, sweet overlaying petrichor;
the ammoniac smell of bats under a bridge. In this way
I navigate between the sacred and the mundane, nose
twitching, moth to the flame shining on my fingernails.

Mountain

There’s a mirage along the far edge of the playa, and I’m slowly walking
towards it. I measure distance in time here: the weeks since I started,
how many more weeks to travel, as the skin of the alkali basin crackles
under my feet. The moon sets, and the air drops its furious heat into a
thermal sinkhole. Now I can see it, the tilted uplift lined dark on dark
by the absence of stars; the mountain still weeks away, still months tall.

Laughing

Trumpet vine bowers drape the catalpa in
emerald carcanets, lustrous and wet with
morning dew dripping on scuffed sandpaper
footprints in crushed pink stone. Look up!
Blue on green, jays flit and preen, laughing.

Mammatus

By Craig Lindsay (own work), via Wikimedia Commons

The multiplicity of succor within a storm, if you remember how to
tip your gaze up and back into the rain. Artemis Ephesus of clouds:
not the Untouched Huntress but the All-Mother, many-breasted,
pendulous, thirst-slaker. Those who study the surface things say
she was born in steep gradients in moisture, temperature, wind
shear across anvil cloud boundaries. An unfortunate reduction of
complexity, I think. Are they afraid to name her fecundity spanning
time, her bronze and marble idols, her uncanny gray-green skies?

Flash flooding

"Bodyboarders in Rio Vista Park, San Marcos River" by Charlie Llewellin.

The conditions are right for a leap. I’m saturated, can’t
absorb much more, and I’ve got no runneled karsts to
sluice the extra off into some aquifer. It doesn’t matter,
though. Rain keeps coming, sheeting down the caliche
under my skin, scouring fossils and calcite crystals bare:
lightning glimpses of my ancient, lime-white corruscations
as I'm tossed downstream, maytagged, pinned in the flood.

Elixir

How brackish those inland seas we carry within us, and how sweet
the salt memory of those tides. This is all I can do, now: fix myself
a cup of coffee, watch the honey-thread spin itself in as I stir, catch
it on the tip of my finger and lick it off. A taste of that mineral elixir,
and I recall how the berry stains set on your hands: sweat as mordant
fixing the juice, dyeing the memory, our skin damp as the inland sea.

Thorn

Here, I’m walking through a garden. There,
beyond this rough-leaved rose hedge, you
cry. Lost child, I can hear you from the other
side of the horizon, the other side of night.
I call you lost even though you’re held, for
who can say the man who holds you is your
family? All I have to hear you with are these
eyes, that photograph. The dark red petals
at my feet have been blown down by a storm;
the blood running into your eyes fills mine
with tears. Who would gouge a small boy?
Who would be glad his blood fell, spotted the
street, scattered it with iron-scented petals?

Epistolary

The image is from a lovely article on the making of a new mosaic by Aidan Hart.

The alphabets we use are all broken, but you and I
don't need them whole. Tesserae from our respective
shard-hordes, rough against fingertips that fit them into
place, speak for us, to each other, in a mosaic of un-
voiced vowels: silent, layered, reflecting glints of light.

The Field Geologist at the Solitario

Once long ago, hot fluid rock irrupted, blistered up
between and beneath dead oceans, then cooled
into a hidden lens that capped deeper fire. Wind
scoured it, rain wore it down, but it still grew until
it blew itself up then collapsed. A pluton. A laccolith.
A volcano. A caldera. These concentric baffles are the
places where the whole story is laid out, but I can’t
read it with any sure sense I know what happened
and when. Some days I feel like that: like I’ve been
taken apart, reshuffled, know there’s things missing
and I’m still trying to make it make sense. This self,
this Solitario; no quest, just a traveler’s field notes.

Loop: January 1, 2015

Laying the ground, let’s just say this isn’t really a loop:
the beginning and end meet, but the sky’s lighter, the
air drier on my skin, and the cormorant I saw with gulls
on a wet containment boom flew off as I looked its way.

So it’s different and yet not: walking, casting on the trail,
scuffling in cypress needle duff. Or walking sans shadow,
not-loop again, recursive. Years ago these half-buried stones
sat atop the trail’s edge and I played patter-steps, hopping
stone to stone along the row. Today or later, another loop;
I’m sure to jump from rock to rock some more, wobbling,
awkward as that cormorant when it stepped into the sky.

Embers

Photo by Jens Buurgaard Nielsen

This long match—the screen lit up in my dim
room. I tap on dry tinder (fingertips over keys)
until we glow and it catches, just enough to make
a tiny sun in my singed pocket, all good to go.