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.