Land

Mary Cokenour, "Cave Rocks / Sierra La Sal / Dry Valley," 2014

The mountain reclines, propped up on an elbow of
old volcanisms, a dense slope-shouldered anticline
pressing towards the highway. But this is only one
manifestation of the Heavenly-Man-Neither-Man-
Nor-Woman, this mountain—every part’s a whole
in this place that sings itself into being through its
mineral self, its organic self. As if Adam Ha-Rishon,
my ancestor’s gigantic, all-souled embodiment of
Creation, was Walt Whitman, as if my minute self
could understand such a gift (it can’t). Still, I’ll sing
to it, within it, my thin voice scratchy as a cricket’s,
joyful for the rain in the distance, for greener land.

Repairs

Tknife, "Hike and Yucca Use," 2011

The spiny lizard lays his azure-dusted belly
on a warm sunlit spot on the yucca, scales
sharp, basking. I see his whip tail, think of
the whipstitch we'd practice, repair made
by cutting then slowly peeling that dagger-
sharp leaf tip of a yucca down, down, until
the fiber comes affixed to its needle. We’d
become cobblers, fixing a broken huarache
strap; we’d become saddlers, mending an
old cinch, making it strong enough to hold
the water we’d cache, that yucca needle-
and-thread work strengthening, fixing us.

Windfall

Alicia Martìn, "Libri Come," Auditorium Parco
Della Musica, Rome, 2012

Anansi’s fourth cousins twice removed stopped
by today when I said I had gold-inlaid tumblers
full of whiskey, and magic lanterns that cast all
the silhouettes that ever were, and a Medusa’s
coif-worth of snaking cables sliding themselves
into knots, all for them. I hired them to haul off
fragments of memory; both bent by the heat as
much as by sacks full of broken treasure, they'd
hoist themselves up to the lip of a Hell-mouth,
toss in books with broken spines, loose leaves,
dog-ears. I gave them all my whiskey, and the
right fat coin for each ferryman, and got a gift:
I could almost see and nearly hear my husband’s
mother and daddy, so missed, gone far past that
horizon they'd lately sailed, both telling me it’d
be all right, even if I had no magic coins to bring
them back to this place full of apples, our home.

Border

Jstuby, "Vernal pool at the top of
Enchanted Rock, Texas," 1998

We’re nothing but, and nothing if not,
bounded. Skin touch air, bee on petal,
a water strider riding surface tension—
we delineate self through a land of this
not that, edges so important some get
their own names: the vermilion border,
an ecotone, a scarp. It’s summer on the
Llano Uplift, and sweat stings my eyes,
blurs every bit of borderland. The hard
shapes the hawk sees soften, become
permeable, interpenetrate—lost in an
edgeless place, I forget all my names.

Good

Grief surprised me today, leaking from some old
failing seam deep underground. I saw low clouds
scudding by this morning, their 30° angle lift same
as in every August past, the same as when I came
here, the very same as when Peter left for good. I
sometimes feel like my heart’ll break from nothing
but the sight of white clouds in a white sky, tilted
so uniformly as to be a sign, one as unreadable as
the words piled up inside me. If good’s what I was
left for, then I’ll have none of it. For good, all these
leavings and stayings, permanent as any recurring
dream. For good, these loves, this grief—and me,
all choked up, unable to weep. I look at the sky, at
the signal clouds of August, as they wave goodbye.

Maha-Kalpa

Marcel Karssies, "Mayfly (Ephemera danica, V)," 2004

Mass hatchings, then later a cloud of sparking
consciousness of a sort—drives in overdrive,
mating in flight, Ophelia-like death scenes for
females floating downstream, wings picked off
by fish; the males, crawling off to die. Nymph,
subimago, imago, then start the dance again.
We image-making apes see ourselves in their
translations enough to make them metaphor,
but if we’ll just take a moment (short or long
as one single mayfly’s imago life) to listen, we
can hear the very sound our universe makes as
it yawns and stretches, expanding into its day,
humming its red-shift tune, conjuring mayflies.

Sixteen

NASA, ESA/Hubble and the Hubble Heritage Team,
"The Eagle Nebula’s Pillars of Creation," 2015

Messier was spare in naming—16 on his list of
“things not to be confused with comets.” I find
M16 elegant, deadpan, a relief from the over-
heated tales implicit in other, later naming: the
Snow Queen Cluster, the Eagle Nebula. (For all
that, M16 sits within Serpens Cauda, the tail of
the cosmic snake—another story, in two parts.)
But if you could pull its light down and down to
your waiting eye, or float up and up to les seize,
you’d witness the birth of stars, chemistry and
physics clasping and unclasping, the starlit past
made as present as our rapt attention will allow.

Realities

H. Pellikka, "A multi-colored view
of a kaleidoscope," 2005

Yes, there’s more than one, like right when
we’ve been carried downstream in a flood,
or when a pigeon careens into the window
next to my desk at work, leaving a smudge
on the glass. After I stop typing this poem,
before you start reading it, let’s step back,
watch the pointillism of those moments all
resolving into a fictional whole. Let’s shake
and turn the kaleidoscope, love, its changes
so like reality playing beautiful tricks on us—
in a sandpaper rustle of drifting glass beads,
our hands shift mirrors, and fix geometries.

Axial

Ramdas Ware, "Garden"

The sky’s bleached from the heat; its radiance melts
asphalt, making licorice ridges where the curb joins
the edge of the road. The earth’s dipped a shoulder
towards the star that keeps her in its thrall, and it’s
the season when we small children clinging atop her
broad curve will burn. A million million times we’ve
tugged on her, tantruming red-faced: “give me! give
me!” and she’s indulged us, bringing clover to bloom
in spring rain, letting us suck nectar from its florets.
We forget how our tarry gravel roads make her itch,
and the same shoulder tilted towards the sun could
shrug us off, our bones calcined to feed her flowers.

Toss

BlueRidgeKitties, "Corn Sections," 2010

“[Beauty] is the obverse of longing’s coin.”
—Chris Clarke, “Beauty,” 2008

Diné sing “in beauty may we walk,” hózhóogo
naanéidaał doo, yet I sit still. Longing asks for
stillness; a planchet of self held fixed, steady
so the die can strike. We bear its impression,
a numismatic sidedness—heads gold as corn
pollen, tails dusty as red clay, reeded edges a
boundary, a proof against debasement. I toss
it high, this freshly minted sun, an abstraction
of the worth of a scrubland moonrise, a kiss.

Underexposed

"Half length formal portrait of 'Uncle Moreau'
[Omar ibn Said]," ca. 1850

“Areas of a photo where information is lost due to
extreme darkness are described as ‘crushed blacks.’”

I focus on things falling apart: oxidation making rusted
lace of the side of a scraped auto, a soft pentimenti of
painted ads on brickwork. My depth of field is shallow;
I know my limitations, know I can’t catch a panorama,
it’s beyond me and these tools. And yet, I will get close
enough, hold still long enough to see what others don’t.
A world waits to be seen, up close. Even in the absence
of light, there’s detail that reveals something about us.
The deepest dark, the place where information’s lost, is
named—as if for the Middle Passage—“crushed blacks,”
but that misses the truth seen in portrait after portrait:
“crushed blacks” are radiant within all those portrayed.

Umbra

"Portrait of an African Slave Woman,"
attributed to Annibale Carracci, fragment
of a larger painting, ca. 1580s

The darkest part of the shadow cast by a
celestial body, and a root for umber, the
color of earth, of melanin-blessed skin. A
blessing, I call this, despite how we curse
it in each other or ourselves. Without the
cooling shade, we’d burn. Without earth-
dark pigment, we’d have no ground for a
painting; Carracci knew this in his bones.
So I’ll plant myself in darkness—spotted
as a trout bean, pale as a moon—hoping
to grow strong enough to see my shadow
when it occludes what’s otherwise clear:
a shared reflection in an obsidian mirror.

Portico

Julie Hughes, "Old Bungalow," 2014

Remnants of a lost language grace the front door, all
Greek to our bungalow, whose stick-figure translation
of an ancient temple entrance frames a way in—not
to Old World gods, but to New World aspirations. Its
proportions are square as a shaped-note sing. Vestigial
columns thin as saplings, Homeric hymns lathed down
to American vernacular, it is a Sacred Harp architecture
as plain-spoken as its pagan ancestors were eloquent.

Façade

"The Sears Roebuck House in Urbanna, Virginia," 2010

Every house I saw had them. An upright plane dividing
the world from an interior; threshold where entry, exit
are the only options left. One house hid windfall apples
behind its back; another led me to full-on pareidolia as
it made faces at parents trundling babies by, at an older
woman in an outfit color-coordinated to match her dog.
There are places behind places here. Drapes get jerked
back, leaving a window wide-eyed in surprise. I stand in
one screened doorway, straddle a worn metal sill—this
is the permeable membrane through which we open or
close, turn past into present. This is the reason I smile.

Interior

Chocolatemedia, "Looking Back on History," 2012

The surface may be smooth-laid, or toad-skinned from a
mineral bloom, but that's not what most interests me—
I need to see the space held within the embrace of walls
and floor and ceiling. It's the interior where we live, the
interior where we feel protected. Despite my craving to
be outside what's enclosed, even I hunt for a warren, an
invisible place where, unnoticed, I can hide in plain sight.

Weakness

Dbachman, "Nebra sky disk," 2006

I give. Not up, not in, just out. It is transitory,
this out-giving, like the life of the body, spent
until I’m broke on complex exchanges of what
matters—hope, love, the Krebs cycle, fuel for
my mitochondria, desire, oxidation. My coach
calls this “working to failure;” a holy weakness
that presages strength, a wildfire scorching to
sow. I call it a day, pull the emptied sun down
with me to a hollow where we both will sleep.

Infill

Frank Vincentz, "Raddet ir-Roti Cart Ruts, Xemxija
Heritage Trail in St. Paul's Bay, Malta," 2014

The grid of streets is something like a game board;
the houses, stones. Urban planners, eyes sore and
reddened by the absinthe green wash from those
fluorescent lights overhead, idealists all (who else
would attempt to harmonize overland wagon ruts,
cow paths, and the motion of a new raw century?)
sighing in isolated unison, fingernails tapping out a
neighborhood, its zoning changes—a click on their
keyboard, and a stone’s placed on the goban. O my
boundary setters, leave me a gap in the fence line,
a hollowed out space in your infill, so I can escape.

Acceleration

Ian Paterson, "Downhill Run," 2008

A slight downhill, not enough
to force a change of gait, just
enough to ease the effort, as
if invisible hands were pressed
against the curve of my spine,
pushing me forward. Days are
longer now, pass faster: a cast
shadow from a jet too far away
to be clearly seen. The silvery
shine, a pinpoint flare of light—
it’s so hard to catch my breath.

Scant

Tani Bunchō, "Tao Yuanming
Seated Under a Willow," 1812

The dreams are coming fast and over-
ripe these days, dropping into the tall
grass and melting away before I wake,
nothing left of them but a postcard or
two, the faint wine-breath exhalations
of fermented dream fruit, and an odd
song playing, ear-worming me awake
(last night’s, “Sympathique,” a version
by Pink Martini; the night before it was
Zappa’s “Peaches En Regalia.”) So some
wheel’s been set in motion, runnelling
through me. It leaves such a scant path
to follow, but it’s the only path I’ve got.

Beautiful

If beauty is symmetry, let’s not stop at a
layman’s surface definition. The goddess
wouldn’t. Mathematicians define it as a
type of invariance, claim it’s a “property
that something does not change under a
set of transformations.” So it is, with us.
Our surface geometries rumple and scuff,
but, down deeper than either we or the
world can see, our essential property is
symmetry: invariant in love, unchanging
in grace. The infinite transformations of
the material world? An open set, whose
match point’s won, invariably, by beauty.