Not throwing it, but seated in it: somber, sub-umber, hiding from the Texas sun in a pool of deep shadow. Light olive skin via my ancestors beyond the Pale, shunning high noon, looking for the cool dark places— karst caves, shady seeps where maidenhair fern uncurls. Wander close and you might think I was a ghost I hold so still, leaving you to wonder if I was real or a trick of the light— an invert sun dog, obscured, penumbral.
Turkish prayer rug, 18th c., National Museum in Warsaw
“O Shaper of varicolored clay and cellulose, O Keeper / of same” Scott Cairns, “Idiot Psalms”
This is a help ticket, a message in a bottle, a parchment scroll jammed into the Kotel by literally hired hands. O Shaper, O Keeper, it begins, but it never does end with anything other than an ellipsis. How could it, when our need for assistance is infinite, unbounded? O Shaper, it asks, strengthen the armature upon which you add what will be reduced. O Keeper, it asks, unlock the storm cellar and let us hide among booklets of gold leaf, jam jars full of pigment, preserve us from the whirlwind. Protect us that we might weave ourselves into every magic carpet, encoding in warp and weft an invisible breath, a flight…
Tavik Frantisek Simon, "Weather House," 1917-18
The humidity rises as the clouds lower themselves onto the hills, kissing our eyelashes with dew. It’s difficult to see much past arm’s length now, easier to sit and wait. Fog, dampening sounds except for my nervous chatter about folk art weather houses, arguing with myself about which hair to use at the heart of the hygrometer. You and I, within the low thick clouds, have become invisible to one another, hidden; but still hands will find hands, pass gifts. A strand of fine hair to set tension on a hygrometer’s balance beam; two figurines for a weather house; a reassurance spelled in touch that the fog will lift.
Michelle Erickson and Robert Hunter, "Swirls and Whirls: English Agateware Technology." Francis Place, Yorkshire, ca. 1680. Salt-glazed stoneware. H. 3 1/2". Photo, David Ramsey.
Those objects made to be held and handled grow brittle when kept under glass. What point is preservation when there’s no way to understand the heft of this cup, no rough palm warmed, pressing into the curved belly of a stoneware mug? Even the lustre's false. If it hung on a wood peg near an open stove, smoke would have left it sooty, ready to take a greasy fingerprint or two. A dull finish, but love and use leaves no artifact pristine; love and use is our provenance, not the curator's.
For Peter
There was always a little wind at the top of your hill—the highest point in the county, you said, then walked with me to the bronze geo marker that proved it—and the wind always found something to play with. Down feathers from your golden pheasants, fluffed in drifts near a clump of flowering ginger; green bottle gourds dangling on the trellis above the deck, pendant, phallic, straight out of Marvell. I loved to sit and drink jasmine tea with you, watch the wind blow the steam off and cool us all down. There were no words to the stories we shared. We were the words, tousled by that sweet little wind, daydreaming stories together and again, as if we were the refrain from a song you loved, fading, not fading, like "The Wind Blows Wild."
Lioger, Hand-Stitched Rasps Facebook page, 2014
“The rifflers have just arrived and they look beautiful – elegant. Unpacked one and tried it on a piece of cherry I have been working on and the teeth must be like those of little devils; they take off such a fine set of shavings with little effort.” - Vincent Gaubert, as quoted on the Liogier website
Unwrapped from its oiled leather, the riffler’s curved as a cat’s tongue, ready to lick the neck wood down until it smooths into a song. I’ve watched luthiers at work—such elegant dark arts, I wondered, what midnight bargains were made to ensure the hide glue bound not just soundboard and back, but musician to listener, air to ear? No matter. The bite of a rasp, the resinous dust, all of this making is what I’ve come to see. Still, when the workshop empties and luthiers head home, I’ll stay—listen to the wind tumble down off a mountainside, fingering, bending these strings.
Cliff swallows, swirling from their mud jar nests like smoke. All day long, I’ve been in a trance— half-in and half-out of my body, gazing down at scrimshawed caliche, up at the aerial arabesques. I’m waiting for a hypnotist to walk back behind me, nod to the audience then snap his fingers. It’s then I’d see I was clinging to a lighting rig 50 feet up, not daubing clay on the concrete girder of a highway overpass to make myself a home.
meltedplastic, "Big Thicket Trip," 2010
Down on those low eroded banks that edge along the river bottom, bois d’arc and scrub plums found a patch of blackland dirt deep enough to throw all in and make a thicket. For us, it meant we’d pay a blood price—red thorn scratches and scratch-‘til-you-bleed chigger bites—to get enough fruit to fill our jars with garnet-hued jelly. So we paid it and, hauling pillowcases full of plums no bigger than quail eggs out over our shoulders, we were stopped by another’s payment: deer bones scraped clean of most hide and flesh at the base of a bois d’arc, the tree straight- grained, tall, aiming like an arrow to snag a bit of sunlight, lay it down by the deer’s skull.
Mughal style, "Girl luring quicksilver from a mine with her beauty," mid-18th century
The Hsin Hsiu Pen Tsao laid the groundwork— silver and tin—but it wasn’t until alchemists turned the flame up on cinnabar, condensing its exhalation into Shui Yin, quicksilver, that the formulary for amalgam changed. And it wasn’t until I was seven that I’d chase those mercurial fascinations around with my finger. They were slick as tiny fish, hatchling minnows schooling on a desk in my dad’s dental office, some so small they could hide behind a fallen eyelash. I didn’t know they were poison, but neither did the Chinese alchemists, who had no one to scold them when they tipped their treatises with quicksilver, having chased the bright liquid metal into its glass bedchamber.
Jody Morris, "Greens and reds," 2010
Such costly, buttery jewels to fill crimped tin tubes, so precious we’d twist the caps too tight; the only way to set them loose was with heat from a sulfurous flame. A ragged matchbook from a dive bar and my clumsiness allowed no sophisticated gestures—strike once (dud), twice (dud), until the relief of a spark and flare. More than once I burnt my fingers trying to get a cap off too soon. The oily, golden under- belly of viridian, the joss stick coal that’s cadmium red, lit a fire in me to see all my paintbox gems arrayed on a glass palette, joy warming itself under a halogen light.
Nicolas Poussin, "A Path Leading into a Forest Clearing," c. 1635 - 40
The empty space that becomes sunlight within a sketch by Poussin; the empty space that’s been sun-erased, the blank where a sleepy rattlesnake basks in my memory before Peter intervenes, breaks its spine with a shovel to kill it. It’s the empty space that’s a constant, allowing us to take our breaths, standing with us. The empty space, full of both figure and ground until a vine charcoal gesture sets them apart, rough toothed gesso’d paper biting as gently as a lover on the artist’s fingertips as the mark is made. Creation needs its empty space, creation is the constant and it will fill us, overtopping our floodgates until, again, we’re empty.
Logan Brumm, "Milky Way Over Scholz Lake, Flagstaff Arizona (edited)," 2011
The wreckage and birth of celestial bodies leaving nocturnes and grit sparkling above and around us. It’s been a long while since I’ve left a city looking to be wrapped in perfect darkness. Here, what’s strewn onto the midnight jeweler’s velvet fades out, over-lit by sodium street lamps, parking lot safety needs, spotlight torches in a landscaped yard. So, we go further to see meteors—pinpricks flickering, cascading like a bioluminescent tide—and then come to rest under a galactic archipelago. Lace clouds of diamond dust, beautiful chemistries, the opalescent milt of creation—I’ll tell you that sleeping beneath this celestial sphere is a gift, and dreaming beneath it is to be made whole.
A Zamboni pile, c. 1880, Teylers Museum
So sweet, all the ways in which invention seeks to store its own energy—a battery of designs, but few as accidentally poetic as a Zamboni pile, with its honey and gilding. And what if we took a bit of tissue paper on which we’d written some dreams, sintered it to zinc foil? What if we’d trimmed those dreams out into perfect circles sticky with honey, pressed each foiled disc against another in a neat stack? It might be elegant, fragrant (ozone’s bite a whetstone on which to sharpen wildflowers), but it’d store less of a charge than we store while reading poems, glowing in the shine of a fat full moon.
Robin Stevens, "Boat Tailed Grackle," 2009
Unmoored and planted alongside an alley, stripped of everything except for budding coruscations, these concrete and iron cuttings waiting to root. This is how we grow hedgerows now, not with briar that tugs at the sleeve of a traveler, but with something that lets a traveler sidle by on foot. The builder knows no one who’d walk the asphalt path down, but I would for this gift—watching a grackle land then ruffle and settle, a pitch-black rose blooming on a bollard stalk.
Image from NJ Namju Lee, "Invisible Dream," 2009
Flat, flattened, a collapsing of time and space by a trick of the light, by some post-production voodoo. The walls in this bedroom seem matte. The world outside this room? I believe I could follow a seam until I found a loose edge, then duck behind a landscape as if it were a painted matte. And you? Although our characters have been shot on separate sets, the VFX editor masks us, then sets us down in places, and times, and stories so flatly non-reflective, matte-made that I want to step outside every last frame, undo it.
The cats’ engines are idling, purring at lower RPMs while the dog sleeps, having fallen into a dream of sunbeams pausing on their way through a window just to warm his belly and rump. We’re all idling here. I listen to my breath, then dog and cat breath, even your breath, however far away. A vibration follows; a sigh—the dog adjusts his glowing scrim of dreams, half-closed eyes flicking. Some roughness in his idle, just like cottonwood leaves quaking in a slight wind.
Photo (edited) by Don Bergquist, 2010
I remember this place, the smell of damp earth and petrichor, where I’d lay myself down to hide inside myself, small as a bug. And there’s a pulse, I hear it rushing in my ears—is it mine? Yes. My pulling in, of antennae and feelers, blunts other sounds: that of a bird scrabbling in rotten wood, playing hide-and-seek for keeps with root borers. Lights in the house glow brighter as the sun sets. Soon they’ll call me in to dinner, but I won't go.
Goya, "The Dog," c. 1819–1823
“And just then death came and darkened the eyes of Argos, who had seen Odysseus again after twenty years.” Homer’s Odyssey, Book 17: 260-327 Translation by Stephen Mitchell
The traveler returns, only this time the dog doesn’t quiver with joy, or even recognition. Instead, the gray guard hairs prickle and stand erect; the aged legs stiffen. Everything is an alarm going off, to the dog—even the scent of long-lost family carries panic, not joy. “Who is this thing that carries the pack scent? Who is this stranger, who says I’m theirs?” Nothing to be done except to crouch down, low and slow, avoid the dog’s stare, gentle the breath, wait. With luck, a warm body will lean into another, together exhaling a sigh.
The intermediate stage between here and there is still here. In fact, it’s all here—we’re all here, all us travelers crackling with the stored static electricity of our stories, like Leyden jars in transit. We’re just passing through, I tell myself, but that’s small comfort when I’m amped up as I am, needing to earth the stories, to ground myself. I’m no theologian, god knows, but passing through this bardo (the Bardo of Airports) reminds me of every other waiting room, train station, bus stop, unskillful detour— having not yet arrived where we’re going, we stick to a seat, a carpet. With luck, our fingers’ll find ways to shock us out of dozing, into a semblance of something awake.
Modified image by Tika.Market, "Dusty Bottled trees," 2012
Jugband physics, this: what’s open and empty turns a breath to song, the way wind fills the many mouths of a bottle tree, or fills empty beer cans rolling down the block with wheezy harmonics. In that same way I sing loud and off-key in the car when alone: I’m drained but not crushed, and the motion of even one cloud above me is enough to lift me, fill me like an accordion until I exhale some lyric that hollows me out even more. Oh toss the empties in the back, let’s keep on singing!
Sold by Peter Szuhay, "Glass Cameo Ring of Morpheus," c. 1800
The demiurge wants to pull tight on the leash, jerking us up and out of our dreams: no time for foolishness, it growls, you’d best believe this world’s a very serious place, and what did I give you consciousness for, if not to fret? Call me ungrateful, but subaltern creators are no use to me. I prefer a mystery to what’s spelled out, animals before Adam named them, and I tell that to a god clad in a loud houndstooth coat, holding his bone and horn box of dreams. He’ll help us slip the leash if I promise to pay, and I do. The houndstooth god waits on me to bring him honey (this poem, perhaps) from a sleeping hive where bees hum and murmur, dream of nectar from pale Nicotiana, white Cestrum nocturnum.
Kai Yan, Joseph Wong, "Jasminum Polyanthum," 2011
There was no sense of self at mile 3—just breath, and cadence, and wordless conversation between the hips and spine regarding dance. A few spiders raveling the lake’s edge, catching nothing save for cast shadows and drops of sweat. Salvia, punching red holes in the budding green. A body, this body spelling “go!” in branched-chain letters, chemical phonemes, until a fugitive sweetness—jasmine?— jacks the motor chain, slows it with each in-breath, until a self can be assembled to memorize a scent.
Rosso Fiorentino, “Portrait of Giovinetto," c. 1528
If Diaghilev had seen him, he might have thrown Nijinsky over, overnight. Two years out of beauty school, long copper hair woven in a thick French braid, shampooing the clients out and wiping off stray bits of dye with a washcloth, just the way a cat licks her kittens clean. His name? “Adam.” He told me how much he liked wearing his hair long. I see, I said, my gaze skimming from his flattened aquiline nose to celadon eyes—Asiatic, feline, an ensorcelled prince from a forgotten Russian fairy- tale. To explain away my inability to look away, I should have said I was an artist; he reminded me of Fiorentino’s “Giovinetto.” But my discomfort at stopping, trying not to stare, wasn’t his. His slight smile back took my look at face value, for what it was: an homage, a clumsy worship of male grace.
Armin Vit, from "Dark and Fleshy: The Color of Top Grossing Movies," 2004
It’s for all the world as if we took a sharpened hoe to a milk snake, mistaking it for its venomous near- twin and, undoing what ordinary miracles made it whole, left it disassembled, bleeding, in pieces. For all the world. How have we so broken, forked a path in no direction other than towards chaos, tohu wa bohu, pelting pell-mell into the darkest places we can find? No. Not all darkness. Today I saw something glittering on the basement floor: a rhinestone or a diamond, catching what light it could, unfolding it, tossing it back to dry my tears. That flickering transparent spectra, no bigger than a cigarette ash, staining the dim concrete with joy.
Mwanner, "Pine Meadow Lake in Harriman State Park," 2005
A child would wrinkle her nose, so squeamish and sad for the worm she had fed to the hook, but her grandma would be matter-of-fact: “Darling, that’s how to catch a fish.” It was like that with us, long ago. We clambered into an old blue rowboat, feet wet from the saggy dock and the boat’s slow leak, pulled up its rusting coffee-can anchor, commenced to paddle. The oarlocks were stiff as my grandma’s fingers in the early morning, but all workable enough once moving. Edging the lakeshore, we raised oars and drifted. “Feed the line out so the bobber moves away—good girl! Keep your eye on it. When it dips, tug back to set the hook—I’ll help.” I caught an old soda bottle, then a clump of waterweed, and when I reeled them in and found no fish and needed to put a fresh worm on the hook, I’d tear up. My grandma caught two perch, olivine as lake water, mottled gold, before I saw the bobber dunk beneath a ripple then rise. I tugged—a tug back! The line zipped off the reel until I heard, “Gently, gently…now pull it back.” Grandma helped. Something small and shining swam near—a sunfish, iridescent, sunrise-bellied, flashing its gills in a panic as it was caught. We put beauty in the bucket with the fading perch; grandma gutted them later that day, and I burnt my tongue from the heat of sadness and pride that seasoned my dinner.
Bernardino de Sahagún, "La Historia Universal de las Cosas de Nueva España," aka "The Florentine Codex," 1577
Nahua people call it “skunk sweat,” epazōtl— at a good taqueria you may find it in chilaquiles, but you’ll taste it for sure in beans. If Pythagoras had known about epazote, he’d have understood that adding it to the beanpot was a way to ensure any transiting soul who’d stowed away in a legume would transmigrate before consumption, at the first creosote-tarragon breath. Poor Pythagoras only knew Old World beans. New World legumes, tendrils all coiled and overwinding the maize, hadn’t yet crossed the sea to bean-shy Pythagoreans who’d never imagined Nahua souls.
Zhao Pei Chun, "Chinese doctor feeling the pulse of a patient," Wellcome Images
The resting heart is what we must listen for, if we wish to understand the body. We can listen with our ears, our fingers, to the resting heart’s tidal ebb and flow through the skin at our wrist or throat, and mark it. But that’s not enough to learn what it’s saying. We must hush and listen close at the same time over time, the tidal rush being a live thing in itself, needing daily tending. By touch, with attention, the resting heart will spell and number the body’s story—if staccato, pulse busily scouring out the body’s tide-pools; if a slow even tempo, pulse gently tugging the worn self back together—found, and recovered.
Jerzy Opioła, "Oenothera macrocarpa," 2005
Oenothera scattered in St. Augustine: little sunlit pools shining pistil and stamen at the pollinators. A sweat bee, wearing such bright green kandy metallic as was never seen in a paint and body shop, flashes close by anthers, dusting itself down to a powdery matte finish. I play balance beam on the curb, pretending I’m in the circus, trying to not crush stolons as they reach past concrete towards asphalt; I’m drunk on early spring, thinking of you, happy to lose my footing more than once or twice.
Things in this mirror may appear closer than they really are, the way what we’ve left behind often does. A slough; a canebrake; shell roads. A sump; failing plane trees; glass encrusted alleys. Looking back across those deltas—differences más o meno a lifetime, rounding errors a few moments or an age—questions arise with no scaffold of words. Faint music; a wind soughing beneath a bridge; all the creeks braiding into rivers. Set the chain, and I’ll pull the come-along tighter. Ratchet by ratchet, let’s see if we can draw those far mountains close.
"Newly pollarded willows on Canal Side," copyright David Lally and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence
They’ll do it to crape myrtles, sometimes even to pear trees and oaks, taking the long shears, lopping off all new growth down to the knuckle. It almost always is a mistake. It reminds me of foot binding, "refining" nature by forcing what’s natural to some geometer’s shape, a distortion of beauty so terrible that it makes me helpless with rage. Today, though, I saw a new sadness: a gardener, himself pollarded, flooded by whiskey and his own salt tears and choking on them both. This is why we crack open; we can’t fit ourselves within the crude shape of these rough prunings.
It’s midday: spiderweb snares have long been broken by careless dogs or startled bikers. The dew’s all gone, having vanished in an inhalation of clouds. Young bathers pick their way across gravel and slickrock, tender-footing it, laughing when one of their own missteps and yelps. It’s a long time since I’ve been here, in this palace of memory. The mirror in the creek is cloudy, hedging its bets, knowing I’ll ask after you. It’s cagey today, singing only about light and oak leaves, about small hatchlings no bigger than my pinky nail. It shares no stories for me about things we knew when you were alive. And yet: it knows new stories, it says, tumbling in deep aquifers, and those stories bear my name too.
"Bees," De proprietatibus rerum (BNF Fr. 136, fol. 16), c. 1445-1450
Before man-made hives framed easy access for the curious eye, there were woven skeps, braided and buzzing as a medieval bride on her way, swarm in tow, to be wed. Archaic, yes, but we love old tools, their pleasures of weight and balance in our hands, touching us back as if they were alive, honing our senses; the sweet shaved-wood scent of a gardener’s trug, the bittersweet metallic unctuousness of machinist’s oil, slick on our fingers. Twenty beekeepers clothed in white, walking down a country road: have they learned the smoky, honeyed love that weaving and filling a skep can teach, or are their hives all panopticons?
Hiroko Lancour, "Chance Operations: Enso," 2014
1. Jump To leap is to commit: hours of drill, of gathering speed, accelerating, one-two-THREE-and-POP. You don’t fly off the ground without jettisoning thought, without letting your body think for you. A penultimate step; sink down, elastic, all bound up and coiled; then you rise, unbound.
2. Drive We’ll light out at first light for second chances like these. I can feel my shoulders loosen and drop with each mile gone; can you? The road hum: drummer’s brushes on a snare, our conversation scatting over that rhythm. Even silence makes an open empty music, where we’re bound.
3. Rest Asleep and dreaming, I hold the ends of a rope, one in my right hand, one in my left, making and unmaking a lover’s knot by way of practice. The rope, now a snake twining its caduceus, sticks its forked tongue out at me, slowly winks. Years later I awaken, find my books have come unbound.
It’s like this: your sons and daughters, immune to their own beauty, ask me to bless their weapons before stepping into the arena. Or, maybe, it’s something else entirely: an archipelago of stories strung together along meridians invisible to me, current flowing electric in the interstices between each awkward, graceful island. All I know is what I saw: a young titan, hoisting a rusting world over- head while other young gods laughed and mocked; an olive-skinned Radha, emboldened by her gopis to go and fetch the sun, toss it back into the sky.
Louis Heon, "Sentinelle de théâtre," 2012
The old music falls away, and the lights don’t come up—they dim. The rope that holds the counterweight to tiers of crushed red velvet curtains frays, worrying as it does against a roughened spot on the tie-down. There’s no one on the catwalk to change night into day, blue gel for gold. The actors—were there ever any actors? I can’t remember. And without cue cards or whispered prompts, all that’s left for me to do is to stand and wait quietly in the thin wavering moonbeam of a ghost light, hoping some passer-by will tug the stage door open and help me find my way outside.
Billy Hathorn, "Walnut Springs Park, Seguin, TX," 2013
The weight of the container itself should be considered. If this were a sonnet rather than its thin ghost, a tare scale would feel the form press down as heavily as if I’d put a thumb on the pan. But the container here is light, its line breaks untied, ragged; the poem evaporates a bit while I try to get an accurate read. It makes shifts in tare inevitable, makes it impossible to get any reliable measure. But that’s fine—the mockingbird's a featherweight tare compared to the weight of its song pressing on my heart; the sedge around a stock pond is a tare of no account compared to those carp swirling gold in its cloudy water, a pirate’s treasure drifting Brownian above the soft mud. No adjustments will be made to our tare scale; this light, those fish, that birdsong, can’t be contained, in fact.
Lavender proves out, branching between limestone in a vein of silver leaflets and acanthite colored buds, waiting for bees to refine it. Sunlight on a bent stem where some traveler brushed by: I muddle a leaf between my thumbs and breathe in. Herbaceous, alloyed with caliche, the coin of scent I’ll finger all morning on this overgrown path; not a coin we’d place on the eyes of the beloved dead to keep them from seeing, but the one we’d drop in a fountain to pay for our wishes. That’s the coin I toss, spinning up and out of my hands, through the air, past this poem, to you.
Leaflet, "Mass Waste Palo Duro 2002"
Sometimes “out” means “in,” as in when I say “I’m going out” but I’m really going deep into these strata. No, I’m not a fan of caving—those dark ammoniac places where every skittering is magnified sideways in white wild eyes, nervous laughter. Give me an opening, places whose layers are sheared off—scree, talus massed below every new rockfall— that’s where I’m going, where the cuts are fresh and where what’s laid bare’s laid close enough to us to see.
That serpentine curve of the little blue heron’s
neck, stalking its prey: was that what I saw this
morning? No, I think I saw necessity turned to
beauty as it filtered through me. I am nothing
if not a transformation machine, turning coffee
into distance, changing a small hungry bird into
a chemical dance, into an imperfect memory of
something whole. From my point of view, we’re
reeling from the shock of it—radiant light, gravel
underfoot, the chill air morphing into the steam
of an exhaled breath—the shock of it all so very
overwhelming, we have to turn a blind eye just
to walk through the sunrise and out into the day.
Artist Unknown, "The Gopis Plead with Krishna to Return Their Clothing," The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Long ago, I wrote a poem about your blue- black skin; in it, your back was crosshatched with scars, as if you’d been beaten, whipped until half-dead, dying. That was ages, eons before I knew your name, before I knew my name, before pale laughing milkmaids told stories about that time you hid their clothes as they swam in the river. Now that we know each other in most all our disguises, take joy in each other’s unbroken dance, those scars have become a calligraphy, something I can read you by with my fingertips, with my heart— even in the dark, an illuminated manuscript.
“The Blessingway [Hózhójí] holds historical precedence over all of the other chants, being given to the Earth Surface People shortly after the Emergence into this world.” From Hanksville and Karen Strom
Tonight, we sang like coyotes until the small dog sang with us. “I have come upon it, I have come upon a blessing,” say the singers. Last night, jokes and stories told about your father, by your father through you, about a cat and a medicine show. “People, my relatives, I have come upon blessing,” say the singers. We smile together when the small dog smiles. Before us is blessing, behind us is blessing, above us, all around us, as we howl and laugh, the 12 word song is filled in with pollen, and crushed petals, and cornmeal, singing blessingway through us.
Brocken Inaglory, "Reflection in a soap bubble," 2007
I voice these words here with the same breath that fogs the mirror, the breath that fills soap bubbles. How long might these bubbles fly? Far longer than I will. I’ve seen that stream of bubbles blown by me, when I was a child, soar past my sight; they must have carried my breath in their iridescent bellies across oceans, coming to rest in the frost of the Arctic, breaking upon touching rime. I breathe these words through a loop that shapes them no less than the wand we dipped in soapy water when we were children— wand & loop, embouchure disembodied into thought, into memories. It’s a small circle through which my breath passes, here; I read aloud what I write, making sure it sings. But that loop’s enough to hold the liquid that wraps these words, spoken or unvoiced, and send them on.
MoRDi CuaC, "Amethyst geode in the parent rock," 2003
Emptying comes first, leaving a husk around a center that’s leached out. Was it buried in mud, a lava flow? Staying buried for so long, what was emptied now begins to be infilled, slowly, with beauty. So too with us. Scuffed, roughened, nothing left on the inside except a thin layer of self, after ages forgotten. And then a gift: an osmosis from what seems like nothing percolates through what’s left, lays down amethyst or chalcedony, geometries all perfect, inward, metaphysical; as geodes hide gems until broken open, so too do we.
A simurgh flies over a princess on a throne, artist unknown, San Diego Museum of Art
The upright feather waits for the dark heart to be placed in the bright pan, waits for a finger of truth (pointing, veering) to assess which side outweighs the other. A dog-faced god sees to the procedure. The lion-headed goddess fidgets, waiting to see if she’ll get to devour the soul of the heavy-hearted.
Somehow I found myself in that place, this theater, not sure whether I’m a witness to or the subject of today’s weighing-in. No matter. A nod of respect to the divinities, their roles: then I pull a scarlet velvet cape out of thin air, snap it like a gym towel, swirl it around my shoulders. This goes unremarked by all.
I fish a peacock feather out from a secret side pocket, hoisting it high overhead, yelling “GERONIMO!” and “COME AND TAKE IT!” Anubis slips a sidelong glance at me as the pans sway up and down: the seesaw of immortal life, or the end of a soul. Ammit growls low at me. I wave the peacock feather like a semaphore,
a marshall on the ground guiding through approach something very much larger than the ancients here. That something lifts the spangled bowl of heaven up, up, high enough so when I jump on the scale pans to springboard upward, the peacock feather becomes a simurgh, clasping me lightly in its talons: we're away.
Chris, Untitled, 2014
Was it real? That bird, it passed right in front of me—deep blue, too big to be a bunting, I’m sure, not a jay (no crest no white flash.) Seeing is not believing, seeing as how no one else saw it, and I’m no birder. But: blue as a twilit sky, sidelong gold-flecked glance then pulling, pulling long deep shadows behind, across the creek to home.
Dag Terje Filip Endresen, "Entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, seen the day after its opening," 2008
Between waking and sleeping, I float in some indeterminate place, catch glimpses of myself through dream-crusted eyes; find myself there in the Bardo of Napping as the ghosts of cold milk, warm cookies whisper, “Lie down, hush, go to sleep now.” It seems I’ve caught a cold. I sneeze in triplicate until I’m elsewhere, visit unfinished landscapes where scrubby low trees smell like sarsaparilla and the flowers bleed red. There, I’m riding a seed that’s hoisted by ants who pass me from one to another, myrmechorial dancers sending me and theirs on towards the cache: a new Bardo, the Bardo of Seed-Banks. Sleeping again, waking again, unsure if I’m in loamy tunnels or in my own bed until tossed out; falling out of that dream, I place one bare foot, then the other, on the floor. Loose seeds roll beneath my feet, all just aching to sprout.
USDA NRCS South Dakota, "Final Carrot Harvest in South Dakota High Tunnel," 2013
I’ve heard what’s pulled from a winter garden is sweeter after the frost. Not always true for what grows above ground—tender things get nipped, may die. But for those that root underground— parsnips, celeriac, carrots all come to mind—the chill hand reaching beneath their compost blanket brings a gift of transmutation: starches to sugars, from what’s been stored to what’s been set free.
John Fowler, "In Little Death Hollow Canyon," 2015
It’s just that this poem, these words, my alphabets, are forgeries. The provenance smells right—redolent of crushed gravel, resin and eye-sting of cedar pollen, dried mud—but they’re intended to fool us into feeling what’s not there, lead us to believe (myself most of all) in this edited world. Any real thing is unfixable, evanescent, if it’s real at all; what I share’s a simulacrum.
And yet, and yet, there’s something else here: an indelible ink, passed from mouth to mouth, hand to hand, flashflood washing down through this dry slot canyon, up then splashing over my poor thin fakery, making it as real as any world that holds us both.
It was clear and shining, even at half a football field away. The radiance surrounded those two young women, one dark, one pale—Rose Red and Snow White with cropped hair—and it drew my heart to theirs. My friend nudged me, so we slowed as we approached them, seeing and understanding without being told what had happened— we’d witnessed a betrothal. “She said YES!” beamed the blonde, while her darker lover, with the blank shy smile of someone dazed by their own life, showed us the ring. My friend offered to take their photo; fumbling for the phone, the fair-haired one handed it to us, stepped back, and, snug alongside her fiancée, she faced her witnesses, faced the morning, faced their unwritten story to come.
Dan Slee, "Child walking alone on a beach," 2010
I remember walking along Virginia Beach under a low gray sky, feeling loneliness as vividly as only a child can feel it—piercing, long as the shore, empty as the wet sand where I walked. I’m sure my family must have been close by, somewhere. I’m sure it was only a passing moment. Still, here I am, brave woman stronger than the child I was could have imagined, and loneliness still circles me, makes me call my invisible friends by name: “Oh come visit, and stay.”
Salsola tragus, Forest & Kim Starr via Wikimedia Commons
Just the one: not a saltimbanque family like Picasso portrayed; neither an animal nor mineral, but isolated, vegetable. You go rounding off down the road, diaspore with a thousand fingers all splayed open, then spring back from asphalt over and over, spilling propagule after each roll. Gymnast weed, o brittle wanderer from the steppes, you snuck in cross-border, pile up along fence-lines; every cowboy from Tin Pan Alley sings your name, but none know your empty heart like I do.
Penzai on a mural in the Tang Dynasty tomb of Prince Li Xian, 706 CE
“The first highly prized trees are believed to have been collected in the wild and were full of twists, knots, and deformities. These were seen as sacred, of no practical profane value for timber or other ordinary purpose.” - From the Wikipedia entry on penzai
At first, what was sought looked like what we are: bent concisions formed naturally, a graceful response to unnatural stresses. Later, artifice and craft took matters in hand and applied their snip-shears to the very root of things. That’s why, wearing night to hide myself, I broke into the nursery where all penzai are formed, stole one or a hundred, climbed up past clouds to the ash-laden soil on the side of a mountain. That’s where, wearing a waterfall disguise, I wheedled the crescent moon down to help me dig holes in the dirt, replanting each damaged tree in its own cast shadow, to grow as it would. For a day or an age we’ll hide in that new-old forest, spinning my thefts into raveling yarns of the sacred, the impractical, the heroic; collect and recollect one another, confessing to no crime at all.
Brocken Inaglory, "Fossils in a beach wall," 2007
Like a beach wall that’s sun-struck, then chilled, then baked by the sun again, I’m spalling. All my memories – (sedimentary, additive, a soft entombment of all those drifting everythings that slowly settled to the bottom of my evaporating seas) – are flaking off, and I split as if struck by a hammer, crack along fissures too fine to be seen by any eye. I forget my name (it’s on the tip of my tongue), forget how to listen to the collective that makes a self, the commensality that binds itself together by chemical whisperings and handfastings. And yet, even without listeners or listenings left, at the long blank broken facings of amnesia, something new pushes up in the interstices: something like love.
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