National Parks Service, 2015
My mother didn’t see it, but I did—a gray fox, tail tip black as the burnt pine stumps we’d passed. It was hurrying across the asphalt road, towards the woods, stopped while we drove past. A long look over its shoulder. It met my stare with its own—yellow eyes in ash gray (a gold inclusion in smoky quartz) so feral, so present—and then gone, off into its own day as we went into ours.
skeeze, 2009
I’d like to forge one in the shape of my hands to hold chili pepper suet-cakes (not fatwood), keep the flame of a mating pair of nuthatches lit. Or maybe cast a cresset in a lost-wax mold from a whorl of grand fir branches, bracketing a wildfire with iron needles that’ll never burn. Beauty made to fill with heat and light, like us.
Her makers knew his lidded gaze, inward-seeing, outward-looking, must take us all into the heart of compassion as pure gift. Into loving stillness. Her gilding an homage to all the graces scintillating from his transcendence. The venerated one who listens to the cries of every last living creature has been recast as an exquisite mirror, ornament riffling in waves on every surface, yet surfaces empty of all but the light comprising you, and me, and all her beloveds.
