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.

Assay

Blanka, "Lavender and Bee"

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.

Rockfall

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.

Heron

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.

Kṛṣṇa

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.

Singers

“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.

Bubbles

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.

Geode

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.

Counterbalance

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.