Hi all - please see my nascent new blog here.
https://luxannica.wordpress.com/
I hope to migrate all old work here, but that's where I'll be posting fresh work. Alas, the Blogspot tooling and UX has gotten creaky, and I needed something with less friction.
Photo of Corydalis solida “Beth Evans” from the author's garden
One single name stuck at the end of the binomial,
memento mori for a botanist and their dedication to
certain qualities of the plant: a marble bust set on
a plinth. The plinth has its say, though—irrupting
through pollen blown or carried in, stigma swelling
into seed, seedpod bursting out laughing as it sheds
its appended name, refusing to breed true. I bought
it on impulse, Corydalis solida “Beth Evans”—so
pink!—knowing my friend Beth would smile at how
her namesake shows me early every spring the way
life comes and comes again despite Beth being years
dead. Both of us content that the cultivar name will be
lost, shaken loose, once the bees visit my garden.
Young Gymnocladus dioicus stems with leaf scars visible.
My fingers press on these cold keys and shed
bits of skin too small to see. The wind presses,
too, slips through gaps in the window casings.
A busy wind, chilling my hands while ripping the
last of the winter abscission hold-outs on down.
Leaves shed, dropping off and piling, so slow to
dance. The scars on stems. (I search for the faint
scar on my ring finger, when I took a dull knife and
tried to cut a walking stick from a red osier. The knife
slipped, I cut myself—the shed blood, my red sap,
made payment then, payment now, for the poem.)
Volcanes de lodo, Buzau, Rumanía, 2016
Diego Delso
The wet ground swelling,
pregnant with something I
can’t see. A skin of silt stretched
over a depth, a muddy womb—
who is it that leans in close
to watch as every living thing
makes its way to light?
Manzanita I
Seeing it, why try to paint the ocean? Tides come; death and life, erased.
Manzanita II
Scoured out, and still mud-red iron stains remain. Breath-fog shrouds the view.
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.
1. It’s a snowstorm, or it was, and now the sun is setting past our sight, not yet below the horizon but unseen. The wind’s made a lung of tree ice: gray crepitations.
2. Everything’s been elided by this snow. First the junco tracks, then my steps, a few gone deep where snow-crust broke under my boots. Even these words now blow away
3. as does my heart, from deep red to something pale, untethered, it’s adrift the way dry snow falls, the way a dandelion pappus floats and tumbles once its seed’s dropped.
4. Wayfinding, as the twilight settles in, tinting the blown drifts methylene blue. An open question, as I’m lost again: what is it that I’m bait for, or a trap for? The blue, now darker, now black.
5. A pause. My breath—the slow cadence like yours, I recall, as you drifted off into warm sleep next to me on threadbare blue sheets. (Not indelible—a fugitive indigo, so mutable, weightless as dandelion fluff or a snowflake.)
2. When William Blake wrote “Energy is Eternal Delight” he had the devil speak the statement. (Would he claim other angels called stillness delight? I’d never studied Blake the way you did, dear. All I knew was Blake, the bravura craftsman, danced backwards on copperplate.)
3. The stillness of the body of the beloved, who was once my husband. I needed to witness it, to speak to it, his body an unravelling, no longer in consonance with our life. We knew it would come, the tsunami, the waves draining ahead of death.
4. I don’t cry much. Unless I see another’s tears mine rarely come. My mourning wraps itself in stillness. No plañideras need be hired—let us sit together, let those leaves fall for a shroud, for every wild thing that falls dead mid-breath.
5. Our mother star has broken through clouds, its radiance caught by my upturned face as if I were a sunflower. It dazzles me. All joy that was, has been doubled, tripled, washing over me, leaving me breathless, motionless, for a moment I’m still in your arms. This love, as profligate as fireweed.
1. Drifts of fallen elm leaves swept up and hidden in a bin, leaching summer light. I spilled them out, piled the gold to make a winter’s bed for shadbush and twinberry.
2. The Scythians knew the bride-price it’d take to gain a princess. Among their gifts—a pair of gryphons in hammered repoussé, ready to seize the light with their golden claws. Did they prick her skin when she first wore them?
3. The well is deep. The water’s dark. The coin I toss to wish upon—the sun, and I follow it down. The only way to rise and float is to empty my pockets, but I can’t; fingers much too numb to grasp for gold.
4. Love is the thing without tarnish. No, that’s not true, love is the thing that’s ductile. Ah no, try again, love is the thing that’s nothing like gold? Yes, better, but still not true. Love is what’s left, after the riffling sluice is done.
5. Oh, beloved, I’d lace up my boots and lace my fingers in yours, walk beneath the fir and the hemlock, walk into the shadows to lose our way, to find it again lit by the light of our kisses, by the light of golden chanterelles.
. . .
To learn more about the new poetic form, the cadralor, see Gleam.
1. The ends of my fingers smell like clay and hoja santa. It’s leftovers for supper after digging in the dirt, the grit between my teeth extra spice for the mole verde. My mood? Nixtamal blue, bitter, alkaline.
2. I’m trapped, I’m free, I’m old and dying, a shock to myself, someone’s baby left to freeze on a hill. See those bones bent at the edge of the woods, a soul dowsing for a womb. The fall wind stutters, turns itself inside out for me, then scours me pink.
3. Radio sending me the right beat for a slow shuffle, a gliding two-step around the living room and I start to dance but it’s just me, so I stop. When did I last dance with my fingers laced through a stranger’s belt loops, formal yet intimate, wheeling, an orrery in sawdust?
4. Nostalgias seize me the way demons seized St. Anthony, lifting me up into the thin cold air. (Schongauer, through Michelangelo, and both so removed from my particular conceits. Could they have even imagined a creature like me?)
5. My father, driving me to ceramics class when I was eight, listening to the radio, forgetting for a moment I was there. He sang along to “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” transported by some longing that embarrassed me to hear it; that longing’s mine, now.
1. A thready pulse; the silken blue line beneath the skin of your wrist telling us your heart is unravelling. How is it that we can’t thread this needle? The vein on the back of your hand shuts its eyes every time we try. The gown, unholy, scant cover for the ceremony.
2. Tuning the guitar to open G, getting it just so. I hear your ghost shimmering through overtones rising off the soundboard, dust rising off the neck; I saw how it broke your heart to no longer have the strength to try. Did you know I did it for your smile, all my practice and play? Gone now, the crown of callus on my fingertips, it’s been that long.
3. A coffee cup, full of DnD dice. Also in the cup: two pair of scissors; two hand-blown perfume bottles no bigger than my thumb, one broken. O undrinkable memory, to find me so parched my lips can’t mouth a blessing, afraid as I am to try my luck, to cut the blossom from its branch, fill what’s fragile with joy.
4. Your practice, those occult beliefs, kept you scrying the flame of your life, writing and reading sigils as if a surety, a bond for meaning. Yet when it all went south, dear, you had me and my love, enough to trim your nails, check for open sores on your feet; even unstrung, you sang to me, instar to eclose to instar.
5. The direct path isn’t for me. It’s the detour, the bend in the road I long for, but now I need to bring back a tale beyond my horizon. I find a ball of red string that’s infinitely long, tie an end to the First Tree and set off. How else could I find my way back, past the bend in an aorta, a thready pulse, the scars upon our hearts?
. . .
To learn more about the new poetic form, the cadralor, see Gleam.
1. Bottled shadows, the inverse of the droplets of liquid mercury I’d play with when I was a child: wet, welling up like tears as my crow- quill pierced the surface tension.
2. Incomplete instructions for making a silverpoint drawing. Rabbit-skin glue needs a little grit, it’s the tooth that bites off the silver. An invisible ink, no truth shown until the tarnish.
3. The well’s broken, we don’t know why. Sent a camera to snake down the hole, pass its signal up, ghostly as a sonogram: a hex nut has stripped off, jammed the pump. We call a machinist. His nails, black as new moons.
4. On the floor and flat on my belly, propped up on my elbows, watching Ko-Ko climb out of the inkwell. The old TV screen shiny as my five-year-old’s delight in those adventures I’d have, if I didn’t have to go home; years later, the sad nostalgia of Ko-Ko on tattoo flash.
5. Another home: I learned when northern cardinals flashed red through live-oak, you’d make a wish. Here, it’s ink-black crows who make a wish, on seeing me.
1. The call—squeezing plosives through shafted light—repeats. I tilt my head to fix the source, perhaps to see the bird, but there’s no bird, just the call. Is this a song with no singer? What is it, that cleaves the air and my heart?
2. Taking my loneliness out for a walk, I stopped by a movie theater, a seedy old revival house, where the matinee was a double feature: “Popeye” and “Shaft.” The line went around the block. I paid my five dollars, sat among fierce joy-filled children hollering for their heroes as the baddies were beat down. The cheering in the flickering light, when we still believed in justice.
3. The limb that split off the apple tree the week after we bought the cottage. Where it cracked wasn’t a clean wound. Now half-healed, half- rotten; worse, a water sprout thick as another trunk’s behind the break, an imbalancing act near a row of Os augured by downies. Flecked shadows; perforations tell the wind, “Tear here.”
4. I walked and walked, far from where I lived. It was twilight in that city, I was night-blind at the bottom of those steep sooty canyons. The deserts I’d known weren’t as arid as my hope for joy, there. Waiting for rain, for tears.
5. The first bird I knew, here, was a surprise out on my brother’s balcony. An awkward landing seen out of the corner of my eye as we were talking. Spots! And gray, and a flash of color when it wheeled over the railing, falling into the sky. Red-shafted, my brother said; I thought it a miracle, to be so beautiful and so common.
Chris English, "Auburn, CA: Hummingbird in Lewis Mock Orange Shrub, May 2009"
1. I ripped them out, root and stem, the mock oranges that never bloomed. Tapping on their canes, a hollow sound like a chime made of bones. Too close to the foundation of the cottage for the light to reach them, too close to a time when I didn’t know their name.
2. Every breath shared, as I open a window to the day, though there’s woodsmoke on the air. The snake plant says it will pierce the air for me, and it does. The clearing fog, lifting; light falling, playing mumblety-peg with the dagger of a leaf.
3. Who gave me the gray-green jasper I dug out of the flower-bed? Whose mouth did I kiss to tongue the stone, taste the clay? Who was it, pica-kissing the dirt under my nails, sucking my fingers clean? I dreamt I’d mislaid myself, woke in a muddy bed.
4. Some old wives’ tale retold to its roots, when the bone meal for planting roses began as blood sacrifice—as I remake garden beds, digging through worms and clay, I find a coccyx under an old white rose, shank bones under a sword fern; porous, rusted from the iron seep.
5. At your touch, memories stir and rise, dust motes from places in me I’d long forgotten—the sweetness of maple sugar on my lips, the vanillin lignin smell of pages from a long-awaited book I opened, as you open me; oh place your mark, love, hold where we stop for now to start again later; let’s not forget how our bones will feed the flowers.
.
.
.
To learn more about the new poetic form, the cadralor, see Gleam.
