Dbachman, "Nebra sky disk," 2006
I give. Not up, not in, just out. It is transitory, this out-giving, like the life of the body, spent until I’m broke on complex exchanges of what matters—hope, love, the Krebs cycle, fuel for my mitochondria, desire, oxidation. My coach calls this “working to failure;” a holy weakness that presages strength, a wildfire scorching to sow. I call it a day, pull the emptied sun down with me to a hollow where we both will sleep.
Frank Vincentz, "Raddet ir-Roti Cart Ruts, Xemxija Heritage Trail in St. Paul's Bay, Malta," 2014
The grid of streets is something like a game board; the houses, stones. Urban planners, eyes sore and reddened by the absinthe green wash from those fluorescent lights overhead, idealists all (who else would attempt to harmonize overland wagon ruts, cow paths, and the motion of a new raw century?) sighing in isolated unison, fingernails tapping out a neighborhood, its zoning changes—a click on their keyboard, and a stone’s placed on the goban. O my boundary setters, leave me a gap in the fence line, a hollowed out space in your infill, so I can escape.
Ian Paterson, "Downhill Run," 2008
A slight downhill, not enough to force a change of gait, just enough to ease the effort, as if invisible hands were pressed against the curve of my spine, pushing me forward. Days are longer now, pass faster: a cast shadow from a jet too far away to be clearly seen. The silvery shine, a pinpoint flare of light— it’s so hard to catch my breath.
Tani BunchÅ, "Tao Yuanming Seated Under a Willow," 1812
The dreams are coming fast and over- ripe these days, dropping into the tall grass and melting away before I wake, nothing left of them but a postcard or two, the faint wine-breath exhalations of fermented dream fruit, and an odd song playing, ear-worming me awake (last night’s, “Sympathique,” a version by Pink Martini; the night before it was Zappa’s “Peaches En Regalia.”) So some wheel’s been set in motion, runnelling through me. It leaves such a scant path to follow, but it’s the only path I’ve got.
If beauty is symmetry, let’s not stop at a layman’s surface definition. The goddess wouldn’t. Mathematicians define it as a type of invariance, claim it’s a “property that something does not change under a set of transformations.” So it is, with us. Our surface geometries rumple and scuff, but, down deeper than either we or the world can see, our essential property is symmetry: invariant in love, unchanging in grace. The infinite transformations of the material world? An open set, whose match point’s won, invariably, by beauty.
Eastman Johnson, "The Girl I Left Behind Me," ca. 1872
My grandma taught me how to size and pluck a blade of grass, press my thumbs together then pull it tight in the gap, and blow. We’d whistle up the wind, whistle a summer storm, whistle the daddy long- legs that pulsed in the outhouse corners to doze and then sleep. A green song, so fine and tender, from a green part of life. I haven’t played those pipes much lately— the grass here’s too tough, coarse enough to endure drought and flood, not as good for a tune. But maybe, where I’m heading, those old new songs will come out to play. Spring green, pushing up towards a pearly sky; seed and rhizome, bud and blade, girl and grandma, making a grass whistle sing.
Georges de Latour, "Magdalen with the Smoking Flame," c 1640-45
The pilot’s gone out. Once, twice, three times I try to get it to catch, the ticking piezo not helping. Low sideways glances confirm it’s time for a kitchen match, if I can find one in that drawer among the stabby clutter without cutting myself. A slow, measured exploration, the tips of my fingers listening for scattered match- sticks, my hand hidden—yes, there they are, two matches fished out and pinned between my index and middle fingers. I drag one across a bread stone—no spark, just a chemical smudge. Another match, faster strike and drag, and a blossom of flame unfurls, sparking the pilot too, its transparent blue streaked with iris. The light arrives first—the rising heat follows.
FrankensteinsCyborg, "Acetylsalicylic acid," 2015
The world is too large and complicated for me to attend it whole; all I can grasp are the small, least significant facets. My arms and shoulders ache: that’s one instance of what my attention can encompass. A small dog is smiling, panting from the heat of the day—that’s another. The plumbago, blooming, may be more significant than the other facets, having stolen bits of the summer sky for bees. Or perhaps not. My bias towards beauty leads me into errors of the von Restorff kind, giving those beautiful things I see primacy, foregrounding in memory—a trick of the light, at play with the mind. But if a gem's beauty begins with the path light takes through its facets, no wonder I find, even in this cut and ground-down world, beauty everywhere, light spilling from every facet, every facet a prism to parse the world into bright signals, breaking it open through us, moving light to full spectrum.
Eastnor Pottery, "More Clay Babies," 2009
I could stitch words together on the aesthetics of a scar, but I’d rather tell you how my ad hoc kintsukuroi looked nothing like those wabi-sabi cups, sagacious and gold-veined, sitting quietly all over Pinterest. The green glass Virgin, broken in two, didn’t cut me when I brushed an alcohol soaked swab along her sharp edges. She took a ribboning of epoxy and gold leaf in good spirits, holding still while the mix set, but I worked too fast, striving to set the fix with the artless grace of a Japanese master potter, achieving only the artless part. It’s right, I suppose, that the mend looks as if a five-year-old did it, since the child I am wanted so very much to heal the keepsake. A slower mending is forgiveness—of myself, for my unskillfulness, my attachment to an empty vessel full of grace, the pointer to what's gone.
John Colosimo (colosimophotography.com)/ESO, "A Galactic view from the Observation Deck," 2015
This body, walking, contains and creates much too much information to share with you. If digitized, this walking— streamed to the cloud in a fine-grained flow of Big Data— would stop. The only cloud vast enough to hold this body walking might be the Large Magellanic. I need to be lossy in transmission, an imperfect translation of a physiology of forward motion (mine) on a sandy path (recollected) to language that elides as much as it reveals. Poetry is lossy, just like me. This self is not identical to this body walking; it’s constructed, compressed, an algorithm with which we can search for what’s needed to reconstruct the whole of this body, walking, stumbling towards what’s still unseen.
NASA Headquarters, "Greatest Images of NASA (NASA-HQ-GRIN)," via Wikimedia Commons
I pull a handle, and there’s a loose mechanical racket from gap-toothed gears and sticky kicker paddles as I wait to see where the reels stop. Cherry, cherry, and... lemon—not a winner. That’s just money, though. I’ve got more important things to bet on, and I am feeling lucky, a bit of Saint John the Conqueroo tucked away in a pocket. Let’s spin the dial on a combination lock that has Class M stars marking n numbers; we are so close to unlocking infinity, when a bolt settles true in a notch on the disc-shaped galaxy within, I can feel it tick like a heartbeat. I’m ready to steal the sky. Those are the stakes, after all: not a gamble for nickels with odds set by the house, but picking a lock on treasure so vast it’s as large as the Milky Way, as large as love.
Shared on Pinterest, found on Etsy, original source unknown
We’ve wrapped the family up in thin glass and chipboard, hoping like hell they never fall to the floor. The green glass Virgin had already taken a knock, broken in two right at the waist by an errant dusting. She was something Peter found for pocket change at La Pulga, vessel for what was holy until a cleaning crew cracked her and hid her: a crafted thing, not Mary Queen of Heaven, but still. I’m feeling at least as fragile as all those keepsakes, now. I wonder, if I learn kintsugi, could I repair the glass Virgin and myself, gold lacquer serving as scar and as stitch? No matter—the dead have no care for cracked glass, so why should the living?
A small clatter made by shells as the lake laps at my feet, shuffles the nacreous or bone-white calling cards left by recently departed mollusks. Piled on the mud flat like beggars’ cupped palms, or cast-offs from a shoreline three-card monte grift; all their soft former residents long gone and literally dis-mantled. What wonders they were: an inner mantle, secret skins secreting shields for their tendernesses; those pilgrims’ markers sheltering them as they grew fat. It seems simpler to be housed safe in flesh alone; not restlessly tossing under cloudy skies, shedding the artifacts that add drag to my wandering.
ZEISS Microscopy, "CellNova - Montage of images of micro and macro scale objects," 2016
To be this little, small as a spore or a grain of pollen, doesn’t take much magic. I can put myself in my pocket, endlessly, recursively until I vanish in the lint. Enlarging is more complicated, requiring a mirror bigger than the 82” in the Otto Struve Telescope, a bellows made from papyrus impregnated with nitrocellulose, and a coulee wide enough to hide in or project upon. You might see me, scaling from µ to M and back again, but you might not believe your eyes.
yorkshireman, "Purple thistle," 2015
The choke is blown. Drifts of down that the wind’s not lifted, gather; I reach to touch the amethyst edge, am pricked, set with a welling ruby, my skin the finding for a rare jewel. Quilting for a goldfinch nest, tinder for a hunter’s fire, choke protecting the heart beneath, baskets of down to fill a mattress: soft as I lay upon it under your gaze. Later, alone, a few spines pierce the pallet ticking, leave me tossing: sleepless, prickly nights.
John Goodrich, "Amur Tiger," 2001, all rights reserved
You see it, in the moment when the cage door opens. The freshly tagged animal hangs back, compressing itself in the shadows, and pauses. Perhaps a twig brushes the metal hasp. Perhaps the wind carries a memory of something lost. Extension and explosion, a leap away from the frightening smells, from its own fear, breaking in a straight line out past those who watch, to the indefinite edge, to blend, to hide. It’s there: panting, belly pressing into leaf litter, waiting to feel safe enough to move again. The animal in me does much the same. We both leave bits of ourselves on cat-claw and bramble as we try to scrape off the tracking tags, cover our traces.
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