Whistle

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.

Relight

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.

Faceted

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.

Mending

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.

Lossy

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.

Bandits

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.

Fragile

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?

Pallium

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.

Scale

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.

Thistledown

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.

Spoor

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.

Floorplans

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.

Landfill

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.

Leaving

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.

Yellow

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.

Beacons

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.

Browsing

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.

Weedy

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.

Cache

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.

The Shooting Range

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.