Dbachman, "Nebra sky disk," 2006
I give. Not up, not in, just out. It is transitory, this out-giving, like the life of the body, spent until I’m broke on complex exchanges of what matters—hope, love, the Krebs cycle, fuel for my mitochondria, desire, oxidation. My coach calls this “working to failure;” a holy weakness that presages strength, a wildfire scorching to sow. I call it a day, pull the emptied sun down with me to a hollow where we both will sleep.
Frank Vincentz, "Raddet ir-Roti Cart Ruts, Xemxija Heritage Trail in St. Paul's Bay, Malta," 2014
The grid of streets is something like a game board; the houses, stones. Urban planners, eyes sore and reddened by the absinthe green wash from those fluorescent lights overhead, idealists all (who else would attempt to harmonize overland wagon ruts, cow paths, and the motion of a new raw century?) sighing in isolated unison, fingernails tapping out a neighborhood, its zoning changes—a click on their keyboard, and a stone’s placed on the goban. O my boundary setters, leave me a gap in the fence line, a hollowed out space in your infill, so I can escape.
Ian Paterson, "Downhill Run," 2008
A slight downhill, not enough to force a change of gait, just enough to ease the effort, as if invisible hands were pressed against the curve of my spine, pushing me forward. Days are longer now, pass faster: a cast shadow from a jet too far away to be clearly seen. The silvery shine, a pinpoint flare of light— it’s so hard to catch my breath.
Tani BunchÅ, "Tao Yuanming Seated Under a Willow," 1812
The dreams are coming fast and over- ripe these days, dropping into the tall grass and melting away before I wake, nothing left of them but a postcard or two, the faint wine-breath exhalations of fermented dream fruit, and an odd song playing, ear-worming me awake (last night’s, “Sympathique,” a version by Pink Martini; the night before it was Zappa’s “Peaches En Regalia.”) So some wheel’s been set in motion, runnelling through me. It leaves such a scant path to follow, but it’s the only path I’ve got.
If beauty is symmetry, let’s not stop at a layman’s surface definition. The goddess wouldn’t. Mathematicians define it as a type of invariance, claim it’s a “property that something does not change under a set of transformations.” So it is, with us. Our surface geometries rumple and scuff, but, down deeper than either we or the world can see, our essential property is symmetry: invariant in love, unchanging in grace. The infinite transformations of the material world? An open set, whose match point’s won, invariably, by beauty.
Eastman Johnson, "The Girl I Left Behind Me," ca. 1872
My grandma taught me how to size and pluck a blade of grass, press my thumbs together then pull it tight in the gap, and blow. We’d whistle up the wind, whistle a summer storm, whistle the daddy long- legs that pulsed in the outhouse corners to doze and then sleep. A green song, so fine and tender, from a green part of life. I haven’t played those pipes much lately— the grass here’s too tough, coarse enough to endure drought and flood, not as good for a tune. But maybe, where I’m heading, those old new songs will come out to play. Spring green, pushing up towards a pearly sky; seed and rhizome, bud and blade, girl and grandma, making a grass whistle sing.
Georges de Latour, "Magdalen with the Smoking Flame," c 1640-45
The pilot’s gone out. Once, twice, three times I try to get it to catch, the ticking piezo not helping. Low sideways glances confirm it’s time for a kitchen match, if I can find one in that drawer among the stabby clutter without cutting myself. A slow, measured exploration, the tips of my fingers listening for scattered match- sticks, my hand hidden—yes, there they are, two matches fished out and pinned between my index and middle fingers. I drag one across a bread stone—no spark, just a chemical smudge. Another match, faster strike and drag, and a blossom of flame unfurls, sparking the pilot too, its transparent blue streaked with iris. The light arrives first—the rising heat follows.
FrankensteinsCyborg, "Acetylsalicylic acid," 2015
The world is too large and complicated for me to attend it whole; all I can grasp are the small, least significant facets. My arms and shoulders ache: that’s one instance of what my attention can encompass. A small dog is smiling, panting from the heat of the day—that’s another. The plumbago, blooming, may be more significant than the other facets, having stolen bits of the summer sky for bees. Or perhaps not. My bias towards beauty leads me into errors of the von Restorff kind, giving those beautiful things I see primacy, foregrounding in memory—a trick of the light, at play with the mind. But if a gem's beauty begins with the path light takes through its facets, no wonder I find, even in this cut and ground-down world, beauty everywhere, light spilling from every facet, every facet a prism to parse the world into bright signals, breaking it open through us, moving light to full spectrum.
Eastnor Pottery, "More Clay Babies," 2009
I could stitch words together on the aesthetics of a scar, but I’d rather tell you how my ad hoc kintsukuroi looked nothing like those wabi-sabi cups, sagacious and gold-veined, sitting quietly all over Pinterest. The green glass Virgin, broken in two, didn’t cut me when I brushed an alcohol soaked swab along her sharp edges. She took a ribboning of epoxy and gold leaf in good spirits, holding still while the mix set, but I worked too fast, striving to set the fix with the artless grace of a Japanese master potter, achieving only the artless part. It’s right, I suppose, that the mend looks as if a five-year-old did it, since the child I am wanted so very much to heal the keepsake. A slower mending is forgiveness—of myself, for my unskillfulness, my attachment to an empty vessel full of grace, the pointer to what's gone.
John Colosimo (colosimophotography.com)/ESO, "A Galactic view from the Observation Deck," 2015
This body, walking, contains and creates much too much information to share with you. If digitized, this walking— streamed to the cloud in a fine-grained flow of Big Data— would stop. The only cloud vast enough to hold this body walking might be the Large Magellanic. I need to be lossy in transmission, an imperfect translation of a physiology of forward motion (mine) on a sandy path (recollected) to language that elides as much as it reveals. Poetry is lossy, just like me. This self is not identical to this body walking; it’s constructed, compressed, an algorithm with which we can search for what’s needed to reconstruct the whole of this body, walking, stumbling towards what’s still unseen.
NASA Headquarters, "Greatest Images of NASA (NASA-HQ-GRIN)," via Wikimedia Commons
I pull a handle, and there’s a loose mechanical racket from gap-toothed gears and sticky kicker paddles as I wait to see where the reels stop. Cherry, cherry, and... lemon—not a winner. That’s just money, though. I’ve got more important things to bet on, and I am feeling lucky, a bit of Saint John the Conqueroo tucked away in a pocket. Let’s spin the dial on a combination lock that has Class M stars marking n numbers; we are so close to unlocking infinity, when a bolt settles true in a notch on the disc-shaped galaxy within, I can feel it tick like a heartbeat. I’m ready to steal the sky. Those are the stakes, after all: not a gamble for nickels with odds set by the house, but picking a lock on treasure so vast it’s as large as the Milky Way, as large as love.
Shared on Pinterest, found on Etsy, original source unknown
We’ve wrapped the family up in thin glass and chipboard, hoping like hell they never fall to the floor. The green glass Virgin had already taken a knock, broken in two right at the waist by an errant dusting. She was something Peter found for pocket change at La Pulga, vessel for what was holy until a cleaning crew cracked her and hid her: a crafted thing, not Mary Queen of Heaven, but still. I’m feeling at least as fragile as all those keepsakes, now. I wonder, if I learn kintsugi, could I repair the glass Virgin and myself, gold lacquer serving as scar and as stitch? No matter—the dead have no care for cracked glass, so why should the living?
A small clatter made by shells as the lake laps at my feet, shuffles the nacreous or bone-white calling cards left by recently departed mollusks. Piled on the mud flat like beggars’ cupped palms, or cast-offs from a shoreline three-card monte grift; all their soft former residents long gone and literally dis-mantled. What wonders they were: an inner mantle, secret skins secreting shields for their tendernesses; those pilgrims’ markers sheltering them as they grew fat. It seems simpler to be housed safe in flesh alone; not restlessly tossing under cloudy skies, shedding the artifacts that add drag to my wandering.
ZEISS Microscopy, "CellNova - Montage of images of micro and macro scale objects," 2016
To be this little, small as a spore or a grain of pollen, doesn’t take much magic. I can put myself in my pocket, endlessly, recursively until I vanish in the lint. Enlarging is more complicated, requiring a mirror bigger than the 82” in the Otto Struve Telescope, a bellows made from papyrus impregnated with nitrocellulose, and a coulee wide enough to hide in or project upon. You might see me, scaling from µ to M and back again, but you might not believe your eyes.
yorkshireman, "Purple thistle," 2015
The choke is blown. Drifts of down that the wind’s not lifted, gather; I reach to touch the amethyst edge, am pricked, set with a welling ruby, my skin the finding for a rare jewel. Quilting for a goldfinch nest, tinder for a hunter’s fire, choke protecting the heart beneath, baskets of down to fill a mattress: soft as I lay upon it under your gaze. Later, alone, a few spines pierce the pallet ticking, leave me tossing: sleepless, prickly nights.
John Goodrich, "Amur Tiger," 2001, all rights reserved
You see it, in the moment when the cage door opens. The freshly tagged animal hangs back, compressing itself in the shadows, and pauses. Perhaps a twig brushes the metal hasp. Perhaps the wind carries a memory of something lost. Extension and explosion, a leap away from the frightening smells, from its own fear, breaking in a straight line out past those who watch, to the indefinite edge, to blend, to hide. It’s there: panting, belly pressing into leaf litter, waiting to feel safe enough to move again. The animal in me does much the same. We both leave bits of ourselves on cat-claw and bramble as we try to scrape off the tracking tags, cover our traces.
Edward Lear, "Wadi Tayibeh, Egypt," 1849
“And after we are in the new house, when memories of other places we have lived in come back to us, we travel to the land of Motionless Childhood, motionless the way all Immemorial things are.” —Gaston Bachelard, “The Poetics of Space,” pages 5-6.
I’m 14, nestled in a wingback chair, legs splayed over one arm, shoulder tucked in tight where the other arm meets the wing, and I’m reading Rexroth’s translations of Tu Fu. Or, I’m 57, sitting propped against pillows in a room full of boxes, writing this poem as the small dog makes a nest between my ankles. Or, I’m 20, laughing with a roommate in our ramshackle kitchen long past midnight, cheap wine helping us fail to solve the world’s, or anyone's, problems. Every one of these moments was in the new house, for all houses are new to me, in this American space, this second- generation immigrant space. Oh yes, the land of Motionless Childhood, so like some fairytales I’ve read—lovely, untrue. My shelters have all been temporary, the contingent spaces ones where I could fall asleep; where, dreaming, I’d sleep- walk through my memory palace, floorplans unfolding time in the land of Unfixed Childhood; always moving, like me.
Amitchell125, "Sutton Hoo burial ground," 2013
The barrow is breathing out. Those past lives we’ve cast off into a bin, onto a mud hill for burial slowly transform into a methane sigh. The flagger helps us pull the load off, and we commiserate with his working on the holiday weekend when he should be drinking a beer. He’s our guide in this land of dead things and I want to give him a coin for the passage, but no time, he’s on to the next, stepping lightly over scrap wood, a child’s ball. A tumulus, all swollen, ripe with the detritus of our material, man-made world—we can feel it shifting and exhaling like a dozy pig the size of a mountain, flatulent, grunting barrow-dreams in its sleep.
John Brewster Jr., "Comfort Starr Mygatt and His Daughter Lucy," 1799
The arc made as the swing approaches apogee; another, as the child lets go and flies away, off a plastic seat and into the air, laughing, landing like a circus acrobat, tumbling on down the soft grassy hill. “Daddy, push me higher!” and how he always would, fathers are like that. Joy in an aerialist’s giggle, joy when tossing the child up to touch the clouds, and the saddest joy, when all the childhood leaving becomes real. Later, so much later if we’re lucky, joy in sadness—we’ll hold our breath, our tears, each other when the daddy flies off into the same sky where we once flew. No wind; the sky blue as a jay feather, the daddy light as a cloud, as he gently floats away.
Wade Tregaskis, "Honeybee in a Trombetta Squash flower," 2015
Buttercup, let’s talk. In your saffron-robed wisdom, you understand the way we apes pile on the meaning. One end of the spectrum: Giotto painting old Judas Iscariot in a yellow cloak (not golden nor sunlit, but piss-colored, draped in fear-stain shame). At another end: Van Gogh’s butter-colored rent house, his sunflowers, all purest joy. And that’s just the West. East, past Jerusalem, even past Mecca, further than Bodhidharma wandered, near the Yellow River, sits the Yellow Emperor, resplendent. One might even enter Yellow Springs, converse with all those dead sitting there in the jaundiced light of an everlasting eclipse of the sun, weak illumination a sulfured glaze on on their desiccated fingers, their game boards and tiles. Or not. The bees don’t care, long as their dead reckoning dance leads them to your honeyed bulls-eye, Buttercup.
Uqbar is back, "Fireflies," 2015
On a trail, in the dark woods—no moonlight, dim lamplight from far-off places. All shadow on shadow. I’m slow, picking my way. A frog as small as a quail’s egg, a silhouette dancing a pas de deux with its own shadow; the black cat, motionless, that resolves as I draw close into a traffic cone marking a ditch. Nothing to see here, literally, except pinprick beacons— distant fireflies, all their micro-constellations reshuffling, first Cygnus, then Lyra, and then Aquila. One by one, those miniature stars of the first magnitude—luciferin-lit Deneb, Vega, Altair—rise and flicker past, guide me home.
Anonymous sweetheart locket, date and photographer unknown, via Pinterest and eBay
In a thrift shop, I rummage through small bins heaped with pretend treasure—fake gold, real silver, lacquered brass, rhinestones, cheap cloisonné. I wonder who’d worn those objects, who tossed them away; where did the lost stories go, tales of an evening out on the town with this brooch, that matched cocktail ring? And then, a find. I fumble with the friction catch, trying it, failing to shim my thumbnail between two halves, worrying it until it pops open. I fumble with the crystal protecting two faded photographs, a young man in a uniform and a young woman. I close the locket, and they kiss; using the thin nail of my index finger, I can reopen the locket, separate them. Such casual sundering from a stranger. In this vermeil pendant not much larger than a cherry, something for O. Henry or for Chekhov, a keepsake no more: no one’s left alive who remembers them, who’ll tell their stories, keep those stories close to the heart.
Gherardo Cibo, "Extracts from an edition of Dioscorides' 'De re medica', Plantago maior," f. 50, c. 1564-1584
Spurge, plantain, sandbur, bastard cabbage holding sticky mud in place on a neglected, dozer-massed low hill—the ragged, scumbled parchment where four-wheelers tossed out the empties, spinning hairpin to make calligraphic tire- tread ayah, knotted as Quranic script. No one much loves those plants, but I might. They’re first to take back what we’ve skinned with graders and bush hogs, to sink roots where they’re not wanted, reclaiming the sandy loam, the waste dirt. Trash plants—invasive, or just a nuisance—so like so-called trash people who were my people, clinging to a thin soil in their goldene medina, spitting to ward off the evil eye. There’s no pristine landscape with people in it; it’s just all tangled, unbeautiful, beautiful as all creation.
Jacob van Hulsdonck, "A Still Life With Wild Strawberries and a Carnation in a Ming Dynasty, Wanli Period, Blue And White Kraak-Type Barbed-Rim Bowl, with Cherries and Redcurrants on a Wooden Ledge," 1620
Unwinding the contents of memory—here I am, in the deep place, having crept past the horde-guardian who happens to be my other self. Once, when I was no longer a child, I had a friend who understood all of what mattered to me, about me, except my loneliness. How could he? We were so young, and I never understood it myself. Reading Beckett to one another in whispers over the phone after midnight, while our parents slept and dreamt their fretful dreams; the voice of my friend in my ear, so soft, reading, “If you think of the forms and light of other days…” And so I do. Now, I tell myself, think of those forms—and the light is time-lapsed, flickering over a meadow where tiny wild strawberries grow, shadows lengthening then snapping back with each shimmering day. I can almost hear a bird, some forgotten bird, chirring. But that would be daylight; and my friend and I, we were closest when hidden in shadow.
Arrivals and departures marked by a two gun salute in an adjoining berm, loud POPs and a deeper BANG, the plink of a bullet stopped by metal. In my life, a similar two gun salute marked my arrival in the not-gone West as I shot up dead appliances rusting on a friend’s ranch. Today it’s a .22 or .45, magazines fully loaded, snapped into place in the grip, safety first and on until I step up to a line scuffed in mud. There’s a pleasure in handling these well-made objects, mixed with dread knowledge: that what I sight along, what’s in my hands, is meant to rip apart flesh, bring death down upon a bird, a deer, a person. There is pleasure in the kick, in the shock to the forearms and hands, the memory of a forge in its warm barrel—but gunmetal’s iron scent is too close to blood for me to want it close at hand, as others here may do.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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