Laughing

Trumpet vine bowers drape the catalpa in
emerald carcanets, lustrous and wet with
morning dew dripping on scuffed sandpaper
footprints in crushed pink stone. Look up!
Blue on green, jays flit and preen, laughing.

Mammatus

By Craig Lindsay (own work), via Wikimedia Commons

The multiplicity of succor within a storm, if you remember how to
tip your gaze up and back into the rain. Artemis Ephesus of clouds:
not the Untouched Huntress but the All-Mother, many-breasted,
pendulous, thirst-slaker. Those who study the surface things say
she was born in steep gradients in moisture, temperature, wind
shear across anvil cloud boundaries. An unfortunate reduction of
complexity, I think. Are they afraid to name her fecundity spanning
time, her bronze and marble idols, her uncanny gray-green skies?

Flash flooding

"Bodyboarders in Rio Vista Park, San Marcos River" by Charlie Llewellin.

The conditions are right for a leap. I’m saturated, can’t
absorb much more, and I’ve got no runneled karsts to
sluice the extra off into some aquifer. It doesn’t matter,
though. Rain keeps coming, sheeting down the caliche
under my skin, scouring fossils and calcite crystals bare:
lightning glimpses of my ancient, lime-white corruscations
as I'm tossed downstream, maytagged, pinned in the flood.

Elixir

How brackish those inland seas we carry within us, and how sweet
the salt memory of those tides. This is all I can do, now: fix myself
a cup of coffee, watch the honey-thread spin itself in as I stir, catch
it on the tip of my finger and lick it off. A taste of that mineral elixir,
and I recall how the berry stains set on your hands: sweat as mordant
fixing the juice, dyeing the memory, our skin damp as the inland sea.

Thorn

Here, I’m walking through a garden. There,
beyond this rough-leaved rose hedge, you
cry. Lost child, I can hear you from the other
side of the horizon, the other side of night.
I call you lost even though you’re held, for
who can say the man who holds you is your
family? All I have to hear you with are these
eyes, that photograph. The dark red petals
at my feet have been blown down by a storm;
the blood running into your eyes fills mine
with tears. Who would gouge a small boy?
Who would be glad his blood fell, spotted the
street, scattered it with iron-scented petals?

Epistolary

The image is from a lovely article on the making of a new mosaic by Aidan Hart.

The alphabets we use are all broken, but you and I
don't need them whole. Tesserae from our respective
shard-hordes, rough against fingertips that fit them into
place, speak for us, to each other, in a mosaic of un-
voiced vowels: silent, layered, reflecting glints of light.

The Field Geologist at the Solitario

Once long ago, hot fluid rock irrupted, blistered up
between and beneath dead oceans, then cooled
into a hidden lens that capped deeper fire. Wind
scoured it, rain wore it down, but it still grew until
it blew itself up then collapsed. A pluton. A laccolith.
A volcano. A caldera. These concentric baffles are the
places where the whole story is laid out, but I can’t
read it with any sure sense I know what happened
and when. Some days I feel like that: like I’ve been
taken apart, reshuffled, know there’s things missing
and I’m still trying to make it make sense. This self,
this Solitario; no quest, just a traveler’s field notes.

Loop: January 1, 2015

Laying the ground, let’s just say this isn’t really a loop:
the beginning and end meet, but the sky’s lighter, the
air drier on my skin, and the cormorant I saw with gulls
on a wet containment boom flew off as I looked its way.

So it’s different and yet not: walking, casting on the trail,
scuffling in cypress needle duff. Or walking sans shadow,
not-loop again, recursive. Years ago these half-buried stones
sat atop the trail’s edge and I played patter-steps, hopping
stone to stone along the row. Today or later, another loop;
I’m sure to jump from rock to rock some more, wobbling,
awkward as that cormorant when it stepped into the sky.

Embers

Photo by Jens Buurgaard Nielsen

This long match—the screen lit up in my dim
room. I tap on dry tinder (fingertips over keys)
until we glow and it catches, just enough to make
a tiny sun in my singed pocket, all good to go.

Abscission

Oxfordian Kissuth, "Autumn Leaves"

The trees are running with scissors, snipping off
their motley: leaves, spiraling down around ghost
maypoles, a centripetal dance. I kick them up and
back into the sharp wind. You may think it’s gusts
that make these dry palmate mudras fall, but they
grow to break—abscission in their cells, and mine.

Waking after sleeping late

Sean McMenemy, "Unmade Bed"

I toss, roll over, sit up, and find the gifts I’ve been given even
more inexplicable than what’s usual for me: the dog-whistle
of tinnitus, a dream in which I was generous with a stranger
and still afraid, a chaotic origami made of candy wrappers.

My ears are full of distant crickets chirring as I think about
that dream, its almost-familiar highways ending in run-down
neighborhoods. It’s as if Kurt Schwitters was Mr. Sandman,
snipping bits from every place I’ve ever been and pasting them

together catawampus across my forehead as I slept so they’d
infuse my dreaming soul. There’s a rustle at the edge of the bed.
The wrapper from a hard candy I sucked on overnight has become
wedged under my hip, crumpling nothing like a folded crane.

Convalescence

Willrad von Doomenstein, "Window at Night"

It’s the “almost home” part of the journey
for this prodigal: I spent what I had to spend,
not quite every last bit but near enough to
feel the air moving through my bones. Hard
to stop myself—sometimes it takes running
to the edge of a horizon, to where I can’t tell
whether that one thin coin I tossed was a dime
or the moon. I can see in my mind’s eye the
doorstep: I’m so weak from this fading illness,
from the relief of return. I steady myself with
a hand on the entryway. The porch light’s on.

Night Recovery

Adam Jackson, "Tall Grass at Night"

I’m too close to the ground to see where this
all landed, but still I’m pushing through sharp
tall grass, sniffing the air for a trace of burnt
metal in the dark. Was it a bottle rocket or a
meteorite? Smoke rises dark against dark, then
an even deeper dark, a hole arms-width into
which my shadow drops. I flatten, belly down
on bent sedge, and pull towards the edge: look
in, look down, where a disc the size of the moon
shines back, black as obsidian, reflecting stars.

In a Crowd

Small Pieris rapae on Cirsium arvense by Olaf Leillinger

So many purpose-filled creatures here clustered
together along the stalled line of their own stories,
shuffling, not quite touching each other. And then
above, alongside, a cabbage white butterfly spirals
up next to me, lifting my eyes and heart skyward.

In my driveway

A red-spotted toad, from The Western Ecological Research Center

A small velvet beanbag lands on my ankle: it’s a toad,
tiny delicate thing, who promptly hops off and into
the grass. Another evening, it’s a house gecko who
falls on my arm as I walk into the house with a load

of groceries. Those touches give such unlikely gifts.
They weave my frayed attention into a single strand
of webbing on which I slackline, wobble, slowly stand
and balance beneath the moon, hold still until it drifts.

Indigestable

Chisos Mountains, Woody Hibbard

It’s stuck in my throat, this choking howl, these rales
rasping on what I’ve swallowed: bezoar of boiled wool
from a too-tight jacket I gnawed off, three fingernails
that broke ragged as I scratched under a fence. Fool,
me, trying to pass as “company.” Semi-feral, wilding
under the thinnest crust of a dinnertime smile: load
me up, I’ll spit out this hairball of restraint, upchuck
all ties. Which fork to use now? The one in the road.

Parfumerie

His opening gambit: a floral, or one that’s just cetalox. No, I said, I’d
prefer incense, resins, smoke; a touch on a test strip is still too light.
Delighted, smiling: “Ah!” he said, “You know your scents!” We tried
another two, then he leaned in. “What about oudh?” Yes, I’ll bite.

Three dark bottles. “Women, ah, women are their own perfumes.”
A mist, then a verse from Eugene Onegin shimmered and decayed.
“What about this one?” Wet ink on vellum, a lost ghazal exhumed;
the third a sonnet of benzoin, aloeswood, and labdanum. He repaid

my attention with a suggestion: a fourth fragrance, without aloes,
an off-center chypre. “There are dimensions to it I think you’ll like.”
No stories painted by scent in this; rather, I’m the story, hallowed
much the same way as a butterfly pinned to a thorn by a shrike.

It was sharply beautiful, that chypre, blending my sweat and skin
with oak moss and vetiver, leather, neroli: “I’ll take it.” Or I’m taken
by it, I thought, impaled on the word. “Tell me what you think in
a few days,” he murmured. “When you wear a scent, it awakens.”

Horizon Lines

Photo by David Morris

My longer trajectory is a trick of the light. I used to
take stock, mapping short-term and long-term plans
as if those disembodied articulations of desire were
apotropaic, would magically ward off chaos in five-
year chunks. Not so; not here. The landscape looks
real, but it’s only made real in a moment of contact:
clay under nails, a small bruise where my shin met
a low limb hard, respiration (mine, yours) fogging
the horizon ahead. Ever prepared I was, two maps
in hand, when a sudden gust turned them to kites
with no strings, floating, soaring up and over a low
ridge before they were lost to sight, like I am now.

Field Songs

Aleatory sky: the low cumulus as plumped
and still as if posing for a matte painting, fat
gray doves of low clouds feathered against
the dry-brushed scrim of pewter altostratus.

These bits of poems rattle around my skull like
loose change; my fingers pick up their copper
penny tang as I scratch for a pen, an unopened
bill or scrap of receipt to jot them down, hold
them still. It’s as random as a coin toss, this way,
mutable as the weather and as surprising as
that grasshopper that hitched a ride with me.

What is my work here, then? Which me does this,
sitting in the interstices of a working day as quietly
as a hunter in a blind? The shutters of sensory
attention tripping open or closed: a signal in,
then out, and the polyphonic voices riffing on
rhythms I can’t hear unless I stop: field songs.

Changing

I peel off the soaked t-shirt and sweats; I’m down
to socks when I look at myself in the bathroom mirror.
Again the shock of this new old me. Naked, it’s clearer
that I can’t see without assessing. I’m still wearing

stories, scars, a callus near the ball of my right foot,
a slight sunburn, a chafed spot that sets me swearing.
Parts melt like beeswax or are shirred, skin needling
from sweat. And then the child I was giggles, drowns

out my noisy old woman’s knees, my past ever present.
The young woman I was caused those creaks: shot put
and knelt kisses, jumping off huge logs dark with soot.
Reflecting, what I see: I’m worn, but incandescent.