Ken Clifton, "Anna's Hummingbird on nest," 2008
Spiderwebs, gathered in a skein then drawn out by the needle of beak. One tap, and a push: she sticks another bit of moss in place, patchworked with lichen, a hidden nursery where she’ll warm her warrior children until they hatch into endless appetite. Her body burns off a scrim of frost. She nests, shivering, held by her private compulsions, the small goddess waiting for her twins to arrive.
Glen Scott, "Ice Explosion," 2006
I walked over a ridge, and saw what we’d heard the day before, thinking it was transformers that had blown: full-grown fir and spruce, shattered where sap froze and burst them, splinters staking outlines around each fallen tree as if some drunk carny axe-thrower’s fever dream had come true. The science I read later, about the fluid mechanics of these deaths, was impenetrable. All I absorbed— sapwood’s osmotic streams became the point of failure; heartwood, impervious, then blew apart.
"Paracas textile 179," c. 2500 BCE, via the Gothenburg Collection
The air that held what songs were sung was descant, desiccant, wicking all singers' breaths away as each chanted those bundled corpses down into a dropped, earthen womb. Wind blew across each singer’s mouth, all becoming reed flutes piping over those who died; sand scoured mouths dry, little cups waiting for a rinse of maize beer after singing. This desert by the sea parches every body until, husked in pierce-work cloaks, they become seed corn, dried and stored for a new season’s planting.
Bowl, earthenware, painted in blue on opaque white glaze, 9th century
It was no accident that slipped tin and lead onto an earthenware skin— rather, a someone who knew how to bring the white clouds down to sit on the clay. One trader may buy up the whole lot for its novelty, no telling, but the maker had a bigger game in mind. Tin for Jupiter, lead for Saturn, fired hotter than a kiln, forge-hot, melting Venus’s copper cestus if she’d let it; and then slow to cool. Alchemy turned the pottery gloss white, the perfect ground for figures and brushwork—something tough enough to take the flame and not crack in two, and yet a thing too fragile for a trader’s carpet-packing.
T. Luong Son, "Một Buổi Tối Ở Quê Nhà / One Evening at Home," 2010
That pot-holed asphalt, a patchwork basin caching the neighbor’s porch-light. Outside my bedroom window, it’s raining; cars pass, shushing themselves as they go, and I recall when I was six, how I’d watch a single slant beam travel, play chase along my bedroom wall. My world now is a platinum print, all silver light and pitch-dark shadow. The child I was sits with me; we count the cars going by, as they play their magic lantern shows.
Peeter van Bredael, "Commedia dell'arte Scene in an Italian Landscape," date unknown
There they are, the Columbines and Harlequins playing behind every Doctor’s back, and here we are, indentured, pressed into service, legion. If we’re a hundred, or a hundred times a hundred, it makes no difference. You and I, wearing dull black, sweating as we pull the drapery back, un- furling backdrops. It’s us who’ll loose the knots on the ballast of ponderous argument, sandbags to tie the rococo confection down. Even tasked with curtain calls countless as the stars, we’ll do our job, dash through hidden crossovers to haul away that gold-braided bloody velvet, reveal the troupe—roses tossed, as they take infinite bows. And while that job’s doing, we’ll whisper its end.
Daniel E. Coe, "Willamette River Historical Stream Channels, Oregon," Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries
Small things that I’ve carried from my last home—a finger-worn post oak acorn, the seahorse husk of a gulf fritillary’s chrysalis— don’t figure in my dreams, here. The turbid water won’t hold my reflection, but holds instead its pale centenarians, white-bellied, mud-veiled, as they nose its soft silted bed for those secrets a river would keep to itself.
