Fugitive II

Detail from Titian's "Bacchus and Ariadne,"
1520-23, National Gallery

Restoring myself to myself with a very
unsteady hand—working in the dark,
by touch. The conservators I’d read
(all chemical savants) understood the
few hours it took for time and light to
dull Veronese’s sky, steal the red from
Titian’s caped Bacchus, rob Vermeer’s
buttery glaze and leave his laurels blue.
But this is the work. If we don’t know
how to unbind an organic dye from its
metallic salt and remake it whole, we
will look under the edges of the frame
for who we were last, when last happy.

Hospital

Dan Cox, "Hospital bed," 2008

You were thin as any aged animal, by then; the
fizz of tiny clots bubbling off from some occult
source had finally stolen the appetite you’d had
for living. We didn’t know what was wrong, we
couldn’t find it or fix it, and you wept to see us
weeping. Enter a doctor, you’d put on a bright
tough smile: “Yes, I want to go to rehab, I beat
this the last time, I want to get out of here, to
go home.” Exit, and you’d turn to us, confused,
grimacing—“Enough.” (We didn’t know we were
watching you die, the losses piling up hid it from
view.) So I’d sit on the edge of your bed, sit you
up, coax you to eat a grape, just one grape, my
arm bracing you, the bones in your spine so close
to the surface I could count their facets against
my skin. How broken we were. You opened your
mouth, let me place a grape on your tongue. Oh,
it was not enough (your scapulae like bird’s wings)
yet it was still too much, a child feeding her father.

Lights

Thomas Hawk, "Ice Skating at the Embarcadero," 2004

When I was a child, asleep as the family
drove through the night, still sleeping

carried by my father into the house, put
in pajamas, tucked into bed and dreams.

(Before I’d fall asleep, car lights through a
window, washing across the bedroom wall.)

When I was a child I watched on a hill for
daddy to come home from work, then run

to him, squeal as he tossed me up high
in the air, a dandelion calyx. (There was

never any question he loved me when
I was a child.) As imperfect as we were,

imperfect as we were, still what it felt
to hold his hand as I wobbled on skates.

I was safe. Even when he’d cast me off
spin me ahead on the ice, delight and

terror in uncertain balance, for every
time I’d catch an edge, he’d catch me.

Frontier

Martin Waldseemüller, from "Ptolemy; Geographiae opus novissima
traductione e Grecorum archetypis castigatissime pressum," 1513

A word that carries the edge of an advancing
army in its pocket is less innocent than I knew.
From frowntere to frontiere, from soldiers to
borderlands; and before then, a shining brow,
the frontem. Adventurers so heavy-laden, bent
at the waist, their foreheads precede bellies as
they cross. So when we say “frontier,” the word
carries its war to receding horizons—yet we’ll
shape our lips to kiss, not curse, as we stumble
headfirst from what’s known to terra incognita.

Pellet

Ondrej Zicha, "Trox beetle stridulation," 2017

The banquet found by a knobbly trox beetle
after an owl’s done: that owl’s undigestable
disjecta compacted, coughed up. An owl is
built to wring its mouse dinner dry, to pack
bones and teeth tight, tuck their calcium in
gray felt, to hack them out. Not me. There
are places within me where words make a
chitinous knot, a lump in my throat. I’m all
choked up, can’t spit it out. It will pass, yes
I know; so do the trox beetles. They mass in
the mud at my feet, expectant, pheromone-
flagging their kin to come near, to wait as I
get myself free of the bones I can’t stomach.

Burst

David Clarke, "Casting directly into old ceramic
candlesticks," 2017

A hot pour into a hollow space can break
it open. Molten pewter, for example, in an
old ceramic candlestick: decoupage gilding
shattered like a wineglass at the wedding,
a slip-cast heart clogged with solid metal.

The way we map interiors, here, is by filling
them. The way we map sorrow is the same.
We place ourselves in some fire, we’re both
alloy and the crucible, our arteries and veins
making form and mold for something molten
that tastes like iron and salt; the heart filled
by its own emptiness, until broken and burst.

Taxus brevifolia

Andrew Curtis, "Yew berries in
the snow, Close House," 2010

An aril—that drop of blood
in the green—is scale made
flesh: enticements for the
varied thrush, a yew seed’s
slated transport. All these
leavings of mine, and fewer
birds to sing our notes out
past the mountain; so many
departures, before a winter
storm buries that last fruit.

Leaving

Robert Hamilton, "The History of British Fishes,
Four Stages of a Fish," Wellcome Library, London

We’d start at the ending, that
muddy old mouth, picking our
way back to before the womb,
laddering up braided streams
where hatchlings clear as glass
(but for yolk sacs still attached)
fed on lacewings, on damselfly
eggs. How it goes is how it went:
parents who’d never wandered
upstream would tell us, their
children, stories full of harbor
silt—so cloudy, opaque, hiding
snags. We’d listen just until the
silver exhalations of meltwater
would find us. Then we’d be off,
climbing, to follow that scent.

Dehiscence

Emily, "Harvesting Poppy Seeds," 2012

1.
We’re seamed, as are seedpods, our lines
of dehiscence marked with a tailor’s chalk,
our pale raphes the memory of how we’ve
been stitched together. When a pod’s ripe,
a split occurs. Or when wounds don’t heal.

2.
Remembering the blush pink poppies, now
all dry, dehiscent rattles—the wind shakes
their prayer for a rainy season into the clay.

3.
The crocus has mistimed itself, tossing dull
blades up from the dark, greening them in
the heat. But we’ve not missed our season—
almost ripe, now, ready for another kind of
transformation, waiting for a wind to come.

Deposition

Thomas Cole, "View from Mount Holyoke,
Northampton, Massachusetts, after a
Thunderstorm—The Oxbow," 1836

The slow river meanders, taking its
time in laying down the silt burden,
its curves wide and looping, almost
tied off in spooning crescents: next
flood brings the oxbowed embrace.

Or when our fingers touched on the
planchette, light as birds, and what
had been inert began to move in the
snail’s own spiral, cochleoid, spelling
out our imitation of Merrill letter by
l      e      t     t   e   r   in adagio magic.

And this last languid wandering, time
bending backwards for us, palming us
(as if we were peas in a sleight) off on
some other cosmos, some other age;
decelerate, smiling, laugh as we stop.

Littoral

NPS photo, "A woman stands alone at
the edge of the wilderness breach," 2014

What had been full is empty,
the animal having gone away
somewhere, no trace except
for a scar where it clung tight
to the nacre. The emptiness
left gathers light: bowled over,
shining side up, half-buried in
sand at neap tide. As if it were
an offertory on an altar of wet
smooth shoreline; as if it was
a clue to where you’ve gone,
this cast-off abalone shell full
of nothing but wind and sky.

Impermanence

John Constable, "Brighton Beach," 1824, V&A

For B.

It may start with a blow, a deep bruise
that overwhelms the body’s ability to
repair itself and clear the damage. Not
rare: the sharply stubbed toe, a barked
shin. If the injury’s deep within muscle,
close to the bone, muscle can literally
ossify. If it’s far from the heart, leaving
tissue starved (crushed capillaries leak,
can no longer bear up), the bruise may
no longer be a bruise, though the dying,
dusky blue’s nearly a match in hue. You,
now your own memento mori as angry
red snakes crawl up a limb, hissing some-
thing worse: poison in the blood. Sepsis.

Demo

Nicholas Poussin, "The Finding of Moses," 1638

It’s one way to show how software works, but it’s
really about making stories, telling tales. Long ago,
a swaddled babe was found among the bulrushes.
Or, once upon a time, a little girl lived with three old
aunties in a cottage on the hill, and they sent her to
the dark forest to gather mushrooms. There will be
dangers to face, monsters to outwit or transform,
the heroine must puzzle out a coded secret before
the moon rises—to save her own life, to save her
aunties who’ve been turned into birds, to win a gift
of understanding the crows’ language—or to restore
the lost data in three clicks, so neatly done it seems
like magic. Abstraction, concision, symbolic language
encoded, spells cast. What was Aaron's rod but a
demo, a snaking proof of concept for the Pharaoh?

Windfall

Mark Shirley, "The Old Apple Orchard,
Wisbech St. Mary," 2008

The old apple tree had never been tended
to (or hadn’t been, for decades)—branches
clotted with suckers almost big as its trunk,
tangled water-sprouts crowned with nests,
all of it too tall, stretched and reaching for
more sun. It welcomed us with a thousand
apples, but before we could say hello the
weight of what it bore sheared off a lateral
limb, smashed a neighbor’s fence. Our first
week in the cottage: what a windfall there
was, the ground covered with apples, bees
and wasps drunk on golden pomace rotting
in the August heat. So this year, we made a
careful reduction. Arborists with chainsaws
took down height and bulk; it’ll take another
two years, more young sawyers in the tree,
more chainsaw and pruning work, until the
tree fits itself better. This year, it’s resting—
only four apples made a windfall, each soft,
fermented, sticky. But the fifth I plucked off
a high branch, more green than gold, and it
came away easy to the pole even if not quite
ripe. A blessing given free; a promise to keep.

Remembrance

Terracotta statuette of a girl playing ball, The Met

A reverse liquid, these bees, swirling
down into a moist leaf-duff bottleneck,
carrying nectar and letters for all our
dead. Our dead, having died before this
rainless desert summer, our dead whose
memory brings another recollection—
the smell of oiled leather. Tack-scent
clinging to my fingers as they clenched,
gripped the pommel tight (the saddle
slipping, rolling, cinch loose)—a sour
old horse trying to scrape me off on the
side of a farm truck. Glove-scent (such
happy magic) as I took it down from a
shelf, loosened the cord that bound it
up around a softball all winter, waiting
for the glove to be softened, reshaped,
until it could do nothing except snag
every errant infield bounce, its deep
pocket a perfect nest for every catch.

And now the sun’s set and the bees have
gone, pouring themselves into the earth.
I’m too parched to cry for my dead, so I
place this near where I saw the bees last,
this crumpled slip of paper; and my fingers
become the cord that binds memory up,
lacing it, becoming the seams, the round
sun burning my palms as we play catch.

Crypsis

Bob Peterson, "Gray Hairstreak (Strymon melinus)," 2011

The little hairstreak slowly rubs its wings,
sliding one against the other. Small magic
the way they catch the light, as if its wings
were old silver dimes rolling across a god’s
knuckles, or ripples in the pewter water of
its genus-river Strymón. I watch as it turns
tails to heads, inverting, headstanding on
a mint blossom. I watch as its doubled tails
settle then dovetail, coin-tricking, cryptic;
so this is how it hides itself in plain sight.

Glossae

sankax, "Common Eastern Bumble Bee
Queen (Bombus impatiens)," 2010

I watch them before sunset, deep-kissing the
nectaries, brushing up on sweetness to make
a hoard against the shortening days. See how
they press themselves urgent into a blossom?
See them, carpenters small and black as lupine
seeds, as they step onto, then taste the mint?
See them, fat Bombus on the fireweed, pinning
those deep pink flowers beneath furred bellies?
A tongue of light silhouettes last bees pulling up
from their gathering, towards sleep and shadow;
the Clarkia and poppies have shut for the night.

Fishing

Zāhir al-Dīn Ulūġh Beg Kūrakan, Souwar
al-kawakib al-thabita, Samarkand, 1436

A long arc of cirrus, segmented and fall-streak
spined: fish bones in a pale blue sky picked clean
by a westerly.

Later, as the sun tucks away: a fat fading contrail
flashes rosy as a brook trout’s belly.

Tonight’s waxing moon: a weight for a cast-net
big enough to catch all those star-bound fish.

Tare II

BRIyyz, "Graffiti covered car at Weyburn Pool,
just north of Weyburn Sask," 2006

The container’s empty. A barge, perhaps, or
a truck, or a covered hopper, the middle car
on the train that’s pinned me down behind a
flashing crossing sign. All these empty things,
still with their own weight. The heaviness of
emptiness, lessons for the mourner: the tare
weight, now, more than what was contained.

Chamaenerion angustifolium

Magenta-flowered fireweed, from "Boreal Forests
in Alaska Becoming More Flammable," photo by
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The late afternoon
sun plays its kissing game with
their frilled corollae.

Each inflorescence
swaying in time; the south wind
waltzing blossoms, bees.

First to revisit
after the blast zone, the char;
reseeding this heart.