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.