Amphibious

The sky’s the color of a raw oyster, shucked and
glistening, as I pick my way down quicksilvered
steps, moving into deeper water. A current wicks
up from my ankles to knees to thighs to belly;
I’m half in, half out when a bandy-legged swimmer,
small as a leaf, darts away. Being of a place and
time together, we’re somewhat kin; I wish it would
stay and tell me a story, but no. This isn’t a fairytale
where a tiny frog coughs up a magical scroll—it’s
a place where the wind plays with my hair, where
the pool cossets me, where whorls on my fingertips
make the trails I follow—ten small labyrinths water-
logged, wrinkling. I touch, then pull up on the ladder
out, re-entering the maze of what world I can grasp.

Sluice

Joseph Mallord William Turner, excerpt
from "River Scene, with Carpenters at Work
Mending a Sluice," The Tate

You’d need to make an appointment to sit
with the sketch Turner made of carpenters
mending a sluice (faint tangles of graphite
laid on paper that still exhales vanillin and
lignin and lead)—but you can look online,
dream about locks, and flow, and the now-
unseen green of the countryside that day
he made it. We’re still in drought here, but
I can feel the monsoon coming. The sluice
gates are open—I can see the acequias, the
wells, the aquifers at last are starting to fill.

Brushfire

Photo by Andrea Booher, FEMA Photo Library, via Wikimedia Commons.

We can smell the smoke from here, and ash
has powdered the hood of the car. It’s all that
fuel left from years of drought that’s burning;
the shredded cedar, tufts of grass tangled up
with horseweed like hair in a comb, one spark
and it all catches. At night, burning bindweed
smolders then glows red, winks out: a field of
fuses that outlines the firebreak’s dark erasure,
a break too narrow to stop the spread.

Écorché

Wax male anatomical figure, Italian, 1776-1780,
Science Museum, London, Wellcome Images.

It’s an additive process, this rendering
what seems flayed so we can understand
the missing surface better. Each soft
scrape of wax pressed against the armature
like a kiss (red for muscle, yellow for tendon
and ligament, white for bone) brings me
closer to a graveyard fact: it’s the surface
that often falls away first, that same
surface through which we learn pain,
comfort, closeness, isolation. Oh my dear
dead teachers, anatomists and artists who
broke the seal of skin in your hunt for bone-
deep truth, you’d be astonished at the sight
of me, your unrecognizable future: this woman
warming wax between her fingers, adding on,
slowly building up her own body of work.

Dowsing

Russell Lee, "Water witch walks in the direction that stick heads him.
Pie Town, New Mexico," 1940, found via this article

I run a fingernail along that branching
witch-hazel, feeling for a thrum at every
Y. Yes, the answer comes, pick me, cut
here. My penknife slips as it bites in, and
I nick myself right at the moment I sever
branch from limb. A little blood wet on
the blade and the branch—a small give-
back to the brushy tree—and I’m almost
ready. I’ll be over there, over those hills,
walking the dry land, palms up and fingers
lightly wrapped around the Y as it calls
out down through rock, nods when the
water held in the branch is answered by
the water down below. No matter how
far off or deep, no matter how parched,
water will find water, the cut tree sings.

Passage

"Map with Ship," artist unknown, via Smithsonian Magazine

An airplane will skim the air like a flat stone, city to city.
We will be on it, in it, tiny limpets clinging to the stone.
An automobile will contain its small, smelly explosions
and nudge towards us, then open its doors, take us in.
We will be in it, then coughed up and out, undigested.
A building will lazily open its glass mouth; we’ll drift in.
We’ll sleep in its breath until morning, when it will yawn
and exhale us, tumble us through the wind to the edge
of a ship, to the edge of the sea, to await our passage.

Syrinx

Dust plume off the Canary Islands, by NASA

The wind makes neighbors of us all—music
from dry streets tamped by strangers’ feet,
from campsite radios, faint but overheard in
those Aeolian processes that lift a veil of dust
in North Africa, trailing gossamer above clouds
until sifting down, powdering the scrub oak in
Texas. Ash from wildfires lifts from the east,
stains our lungs west. Crackling alveoli, rales,
rhonchi sing overtones with each exhale: jet
streams kiss our mouths—a canebreak syrinx.

Cape May

Image from Google Maps.

We spent the whole day at the shore, sitting
on the seawall from sunrise to sundown, the
tide moving out then back in, as if it had to
run an errand mid-day. At low tide, we both
scrambled down the concrete ledge to look
for treasure: dull polished bottle-glass gems,
broken clamshells scoured to fit our fingers,
a chipped teacup half-buried in wet sand.
Later, at night, on the thin hotel room bed,
I felt the waves still moving within my body,
lulling me to sleep, carrying me out to sea.

Migrants

Frank Carey, Fort Union Cistern, 2011

It’s a dry season. My love, that limestone cistern
can’t store enough to see us through—there’s a
hairline crack, and it’s seeping. Frogs pluck songs
from mud near the crack, soft plectrum chirps,
singing “Cheer-up, cheer-up,” but I just can’t. I’ve
watched the sun beat them down into deep burrows,
turn what’s moist into a brittle tomb. Even snakes
are leaving, exits marked by acrid, cursive trails. It’s
a dry season, and it won’t end—the only thing left
is to walk through scrubland, to the edge of the sea.

Surfeit

The redbirds chit as they chase overhead—
dun-blush girl, blazoned boy. I was up before
they were, scuffling by a harvestman legging
his way (home? to hide?) and listening to my
breath. A jay, a jay yells and drops a feather
at my feet, then laughs: “Made you look!” To
begin under an ink-stained moon as crickets
and peepers shimmer, to end sweat-soaked,
breathless in gold light? Dayenu, surfeit of joy.

Summer Dirge

"Shrine at Covered Wells, Arizona" by Tillman

This bright forge has burnt my heart away.
My thoughts all charred by the sun, calcined
ribs crack as I breathe: too parched for tears,
I’m gutted. And look! Even in a grave, no cool
shade—it’s bleached by the white, hot sky.

Croton

We scrubby little things who do well
where it’s scraped earth and caliche
nod to each other. A squat of prairie
tea, a dash out then back by a spotted
whiptail lizard, a bustling caterpillar
hunter (Calosoma affine) as black as
the night I usually wander in, and me,
moving through the understory, the
slightest wind carrying the croton’s
homespun incense: resin and dust.

Iftar

Photograph by ESO/B. Tafreshi, 2012

This is the time we break our fast, when
the sun at last weakens and the waxing
moon rises. I reach into clouds, part the
darkness to take you, o pearl, o moon, in
my hands: an illusion, but your light on
my fingers is no less precious. The first
thing we must do in the dimming is to
slake our thirst; after the long burnt day,
I could drink the mountains dry of dew.

Botanical

Crinum Americanum L., by Alex Popovkin, Bahia, Brazil

I think about those people of mine, those who sewed
uncut gemstones into their hems as trader’s insurance,
those who went with slaves and brocade and sharp steel,
who brought back silk and aloes, those whose names I’ll
never know. Did the needle of loneliness prick them as they
embroidered their tales? Did it prick the way it does me, as
I stitch myself to a place by way of the names of flowers?

Scotoma

"Scotoma," Samira Yamin, Video Projection.

Look at the sun long enough, and all that’s left
is a scotoma of shadow and radiance - not the
face of a boy who was made to watch as you
murdered his family, not your own face (and who
would dare remember you as you’d been, when
once a child?) I know someone who told me the
things you’d done, and I laughed at how stupid
you were, thinking you could eat Death and live.
Is it so hard to believe the simplest mistake is what’s
left you blind now, thinking you’d gaze at the sun
through the darkest glass and steal its glory? You
who all those ghosts stalk, as your blindness grows.

Stalking

Red-Spotted Purple Butterfly, Jay Bock

It’s those little deaths piling up on my doorstep
that break me down. The mud-stained yellow of
a magnolia warbler, eye half-shuttered, one wing
broken and spilling bones; the now unreadable
parchment of what was once a house gecko. All
these small wild things stilled, and no witnesses
save for butterflies who’ve come to sip what’s left.
I’m fit for sadness small enough to carry in hand,
but know bigger grief waits patiently, stalking me.

Heat Lightning

"Heat Lightning near Louisville, Kentucky," B. Badgett, 2010

It’s five in the morning, and I’m moving through the
shadows in shadow by touch, unsteadily scuffling with
small ravines. A ghost – its spin axis a pale torso – drifts
past, trailing a sound like brushes on sand, gleaming for
a fraction of a second in the glint and shudder of heat
lightning. Storm’s so far off I can’t hear it, but it’s close
enough to press its gold coin into my eyes as it passes.

Tenderfoot

Sweat like nettles where I’ve chafed, the pointed burn
of a fire ant unhappy with my position in life, a rebuke
after dinner: I’m so thin-skinned, tears abrade as they
well up, sting as they dampen my cheeks. It’s the heat
of the day, of some moment clinging to itself, you say;
but I know it’s the broken shards cutting underfoot after
we brought the hammer down on this shell of a world.

Havdalah

The damp air becomes a spicebox as I walk between
floods. The smell of rotting Johnson grass, retted blades
waving from beneath piles of brush like some drowned
Ophelia; the last star jasmine, sweet overlaying petrichor;
the ammoniac smell of bats under a bridge. In this way
I navigate between the sacred and the mundane, nose
twitching, moth to the flame shining on my fingernails.

Mountain

There’s a mirage along the far edge of the playa, and I’m slowly walking
towards it. I measure distance in time here: the weeks since I started,
how many more weeks to travel, as the skin of the alkali basin crackles
under my feet. The moon sets, and the air drops its furious heat into a
thermal sinkhole. Now I can see it, the tilted uplift lined dark on dark
by the absence of stars; the mountain still weeks away, still months tall.