Causal

Idaho Department of Fish and Game, "Camas Lily"

The root is what we’re after, in desire and in sequence. No root,
no effect; no root, no us. And since effects propagate from that
root cause then scatter—seeds or thoughts germinate, push out
a pale green shoot, or a bloody-minded act—it’s hard to feel for
the true source in the tangle, if there’s any such thing. A field of
blue camas, its first root hidden from itself by its effect: the lake
in the sky. The origin hidden, too, from us, as we stand near the
field’s edge—the root what we seek, but the effect a beauty so
distracting we forget all our names, our homes, what we’re after.

Footnote

Seabrook Leckie, "Burr hooks," 2008

I didn’t think to check my socks—not much for being
all princess-and-the-pea, me—and so the burr made
a sharp little caltrop surprise. Proof the body’s quicker
than the mind: in the moment before the “ow” arose,
I was hopping on one foot, peeling the sock back from
the other. In the moment after, I spy with my little eye
one spiny asterisk annotating my big toe, transferring
its painful reference from toe to index finger wholly by
inept accident. Where I live, these things happen. Here,
it’s either prickly, venomous, poisonous, pointy, itchy,
droughty, floody, or an uncomfortable combination of
all, ready to set new annotations in flesh and memory.

Intermediary

Bahareh Bisheh, "I Have a Mother...," 2012

An orphan like me wins a place in the heart of a
family by carrying their stories, laying my pallet
down for sleep at the entry to their vault full of
secrets. “See? A little human child,” they smile,
“weak and pretty as a grass stem, hardly able to
carry us in the peristyle if we called her.” So they
let me come near, a favored pet, to take leftovers
from their hands, slowly stroke my hair, murmur
soft words in the shape of flowers, of rain. And
me, the orphan girl—I earn my keep by listening
to these loa and others like them, their tales an
aquifer, a braiding of underground streams too
deep to dowse, their breath shaping songs that
flow through me to you, hollow reed that I am.

Feather

"And he loved feathers with a passion."
From Alain de Botton, The Philosopher's Mail,
"The Great Philosophers 13: John Ruskin"

By the time I noticed, it was already floating
up above my head, turning gently, impossibly.
Had a spider’s bridge thread caught it? No—
no glimmer of light on a line, nothing to hold
it there, spinning lento…adagio…except a small
whirlwind just big enough to carry one feather
aloft, riding some other miracle—a temperature
differential, the dance of heat rising off asphalt
kissing the air sinking cool within deep shade
cast by a bank building. Of such ordinary things—
physics, weather, the shifting seasons, a dove’s
disjecta membra—is such unlikely beauty made.
If I'm lucky, my gaze will always lift and follow.

Erased

Cuneiform Tablet, ca. 2044 BCE. "This tablet was
baked and, in this case, enclosed in another baked
clay envelope for delivery. What we see is the sealed
envelope, and inside of it there is another tablet."

The unraveling of order: a typo in the cuneiform
that needed mucking out, a wandering ox-furrow
where the boustrophedon line rambled, drunken,
falling in a ditch of proto-leading. We could touch
our words, then, fingertips on the impression of a
breath, a glottal stop in wet slab clay. Nothing so
marked could be all gone; our thoughts had mass,
weight. Now, we set them on spinning plates, ever
so mutable. We not only can’t touch our words—a
bit of static, and they’re like the cat in the box. We
can’t ever know whether they’re there, or erased.

Penned

Christine Vaufrey, "Stained Glass Dog - Brou Church,"
photo 2007

Barking dog in a fenced yard, yelling “HEY! Hey
hey hey hey HEY!” three times, four times, with
no breakdown, neither in bark nor fence. Didn’t
Joshua use trumpets to crumble Jericho’s walls?
Poor dog—a trumpet is what it hasn’t got. All it
has is boredom, and loneliness, and a persistent
hope that the next bark will be call-and-response
hollered back, or will tumble the lock on the gate
until it opens, or even possibly conjure a squirrel
down from a neighboring tree. The next bark will
surely do it—until it forgets to bark, puts its nose
into the wind, listens to the approaching thunder.

Vanitas

Scott Fraser, "Three Way Mirror," c. 2006

The rain glazed a mirror upon which we drove,
its silvered runoff rippling in thin sheets across
the highway. There should have been few cars,
but there was traffic, thickening, slowing, then
gradually stopping. “It must be an accident up
ahead,” I said. No sirens, no real sound, just an
intermittent brushy pulse from the windshield
wipers, muted rain. Red lights, brakes tapping
on and off through the merging lines, and then
wreckage: rat’s nests of torn wires in crushed
glass, a dissection of everything that had been
whole. Yellow shrouds as we passed. Suffering
witnessed by the slow procession of strangers
in bits of broken chrome reflecting on those we
presumed dead, their families, our finite selves.

Churched

SplitShire, "Country Road," 2014

On a Sunday, as the clouds drop low, so do we. In
a car, on a road, out of sight of ourselves as we look
around the bend, say a wordless prayer under our
breath for a vulture lying dead in the turn lane, one
wing caught by the wind and beckoning. Churches
every mile or so, little wooden buildings with sharp
steeples, bigger brick buildings draped with vinyl
banners proclaiming good news, or a fish fry. Right
before the turn-off, along the right-of-way, a man
sits on the high green seat of a tractor in his Sunday
best, mowing before the rain comes down, mowing
in fresh-pressed slacks, suspenders, and a bow tie.
Nature is chaos with no hand on a rotary mower—
his hand puts the world into a syntax he can speak.

Notes

Koshy Koshy, "Itr Seller," 2005

Towards the end of our run, the mélange stopped us.
A sweetness, so much of this place every May: almost
unctuously floral star jasmine, pale yellow honeysuckle,
a moment or decades carrying us as we move through
the slight wind, as we pause and sniff the air. But not
just sweetness. Woodsmoke, burnt grease, resinous
mint rosemary, each vanishing as soon as noticed. And
while we know those by heart, one more, unfamiliar:
bitterroot, pitch-dark, maybe oud? A fugitive incense—
lily-in-tar?—pierces us, leaving splinters set to burn.

Vitis

Andy Melton, "Can't wait!", 2008, modified

This land’s been grazed down to loose rock and cipher,
hoof-greeking scratched on a path uphill. No angora tufts
snagged on nopal, just scat from scrawny cabrito who’ve
climbed everything that might’ve held back a mouthful
of something green and tender, something mineral and
compelling—everything but a slack-line liana of mustang
grape, anchored and anchoring a live oak stripped by wilt,
beating the goats back to a truce. They doze at the base
of the grape in its threadbare shade as it lifts up towards
sun-bleached clouds, tendrils coiling, Dionysian ringlets
piled atop each other: the Vitis mustangensis blinks open
its thousand sleeping eyes to be pollen-kissed by bees.

Occultation

nklatt, "occultation over Foot Lake in Willmar, MN," 2009

“An occultation is an event that occurs when one object is hidden
by another object that passes between it and the observer.”
-Wikipedia

Celestial bodies often play a sort of sleight of hand,
leaving astronomers to look for the absence of a star,
a galaxy, as evidence of something unseen—a cloud
of cosmic dust, a dark twin orbiting a brighter sibling,
its transit only noticed when what’s missing returns.
But here, on this thin crumbling crust, isn’t occultation
an everyday occurrence? A man steps in front of me,
hiding a peacock from my sight. A small plane passes
low overhead, and in passing, reveals a fat full moon.
A memory of heartache casts old shadows that transit
between us, absenting us from one another until the
darkness passes, revealing that love had always been.

Filé

Spartan Race, "Muddy Shoes," 2014

The way gumbo mud on your shoes balls up, too
thick and clinging to scrape, the way it grabs your
feet and ankles like a monster might, and you kick
a clotted shoe off, lose another in the suck of soft
clay, run tangled with natty dreads of retted straw,
wet dirt. I look for patches of oxalis, play a game of
trail run hopscotch—jump to the dense green mats,
crush their sorrel tartness underfoot, brush against
and pop those tiny okra-like seedpods. So hard not
to sink further, but the eastern wind pushes, blows
me a rootbeery vanillin kiss through the sassafras.

Tattoo

The Army Children Archive, "Dressing Up,"
via Rachel Duffett

Not ink, but a sharp rhythm that sends all
us soldiers back to our beds. Yes, even me,
in my made-up fatigues, a broomstick on
my shoulder—I’ve drilled dance steps and
swordfights, lit sparklers, tossed poppers.
I’m ready to go to war against being good,
against keeping mud off my shoes. If you’d
bring armor (baking sheet shield, colander
helm) we could muster a fine rebellion, at
least until the sun sets, until drums beat a
tattoo tap-tap-tapping us back to quarters,
until the real wars come visit us for a while.

If moved

US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
"Mangroves," c. 2005, heavily modified

Had the goddess been carried ashore on a shell
to the New World, it might have been on a lion’s
paw; had she been so borne, she might’ve made
every alligator snapper her own, not for beauty
but fierceness. Back when we all slept unformed
in the dreams of imagined ancestors, electrum
coins minted at Aegina were stamped with the
image of a turtle’s patterned shell. O Aphrodite
Ourania, if the foam that shaped you in Cythera
drifted across the ocean to touch here, and here,
along the edge of a coastal mangrove swamp—
Queen of Heaven, you’d have found our snapping
turtles to be as fearsome, as unfettered as you.

Cords

George Brett, "Weekly Journal in Fibre Quipu," 1977

Ties that bind, that make a cat’s cradle,
twined around a same-named measure
of split logs or ripped to release a chute:
add a silent “h” for music, take the “h”
back for what strings and bends a bow,
for the place where panties and t-shirts
are pinned until dry, cheerful pennants
waving when the breeze kicks up. Raffia
plucked by a no-name girl and spun into
gold with Rumpelstiltskin’s help, just like
this poem—rough fiber twisted between
the fingers, a drop spinner magicked and
calling gold ore out from earth, a reverse
lightning snaking up the distaff. You and
I, we understand how to untie tongues
and words, letting meanings out to play.

Creature

Garry Tucker, USFWS, "Alligator
Snapping Turtle," 2004

By the time I arrived, it was trundling down
steep banks through dewberry and rain lily
towards the river, leaving a belly-flattened,
matted tangle behind a carapace knobbled
by osteoderms tic-tac-toeing three rows, its
bony ridges dragging algae and nettles. We
hung back, not wanting to see whether the
monster could pick up speed to snap all our
fingers right off, half-hoping we could touch
it before it sunk into the bottom mud. In its
wake, a cardinal, as bright an incendiary red
as the snapper was dulled camo gray-green.

Shade

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.

Supplication

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…

Hygrometer

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.

Artifact

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.

Wind

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."

Rasp

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.

Trance

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.

Thicket

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.

Amalgam

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.

Paintbox

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.

Constant

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.

Asteroeides

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.

Storage

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.

Bollard

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.

VFX

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.

Idling

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.

Hide-and-seek

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.

Argos

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.

Bardo

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.

Empties

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!

Houndstooth

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.

Fugitive

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.

Grace

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.

Disassembly

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.

Sunfish

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.

Beanpot

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.

Recovery

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.

On the verge

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.

Deltas

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.

Pollarded

"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.

Aquifer

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.

Skep

"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?

Bound / Unbound

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.

Field event

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.

Ghost Light

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.

Tare

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.