Erosion

Photo by Blackland, 2014

The land-shaper here is always water, whether we’re
in drought or not. Paths are scoured, or washed away
when it steps down from the sky. We’re too far from
an ocean for any maritime god to lay a claim—when
land’s reshaped around us, it’s the sky god flinging his
shovels of rain who does it. Even a seep can become a
crow-bar in winter, jimmying ice-blades between layers
of lime and chert, cleaving them into sharp brittle flakes,
some with the bones of past seas showing, some mute,
too shy to speak, but dense and siliceous, a knapper’s
delight. Further along: flint nodules washed out from an
undercut ledge, steel-gray, fine-grained. They’ve been
tumbled one against the other at each flood until their
conchoidal fractures lost every serrated edge; now they
drift to sleep, dream of rain falling on their gravel bed.

Three-in-One

"The Line Cook," photo (manipulated) by staxnet, 2009

For flavor, not heat—the line cook calls on
his holy trinity: hands dance their two-step
with knives, kitchen mumblety-peg that’s
left fine scars next to the burn marks and
tattoos. This one’s God the Father, cher,
he says as he winks at me, dicing the onion
until we both cry; this, the Son (bell pepper
almost comically green), that’s Eternal Life.
And the celery, pale and thin, disappearing
into the gumbo like the very Ghost? Spirit
moves us, moves us all in mysterious ways,
he says, belly and hips swaying as he stirs.

Listening

Aphrodite Anadyomene, Fresco from Pompeii, Casa
di Venus, 1st century AD, photo by Stephen Haynes

An ancient seabed made these hills, where
the only things rich and strange are the whistle
and percolation of bats bubbling up at dusk,
pouring out from a cavern beneath my feet. No
pearls, no coral; just karst, limestone, chalks,
and a seep hidden by maidenhair fern. I know
this place by touch more than sight now—loose
scree rolling underfoot, bare-root handholds,
slickrock, and tannic stains on all my fingers. So
when I tell you I held a fossil oyster shell to my
ear, held it there until I heard primordial oceans
lapping a warm shore, you should believe me.

Restorations

Edgar Degas, "Dancers Practicing at the Barre"

Elsewhere, there’s a painting set on a conservator’s stand. It
waits for the touch of a blue nitrile glove, for her gaze under
the light. In another place, two dancers at the barre embody
and contradict that object on the conservator’s stand. Always
like this, it seems—the hand, the object, the body, the work
of love and attention, the brief time we have to practice such
skills as are needed to restore what’s been damaged, to make
things (and ourselves) whole. Sweat and rhythm and grace, the
solvent for our dancers; ethanol and patience, the solvent for
copal and age; our restorations revealing beauty, unvarnished.

Speaking in tongues

Mt. Hood Wilderness Near Ramona Falls

I went downhill then up the cinder cone past
quiescent Doug-fir, out of breath now, heart
beating loud enough to drown out the flame-
lit prayers of some Mexican men possessed by
the spirit on so early a Sunday in these woods.

A loose gathering under a canopy of painted
sawn wood and tarpaper; each man a picket-
post, planted in their God. Is it an immigrant’s
splintered glossolalia or a Pentecostal fire that
shakes them, loosening tongues of flame above
each head? I can’t quite hear. Like the Doug-fir
at the top I’m deaf and cold, my lungs burning,
mist pearling rain on my face. Yet despite the
chill, sap still rises, filling our limbs—the men,
trees, me—with the washed gold of the day.

Affici amoris ergo

Nicholas Hilliard, "Man Clasping a Hand from a Cloud,"
1588, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Some scholars think the golden letters call forth the Attic,
a reading that brings a mythic past to the bauble’s present,
but this viewer prefers to misread the “t” as “f” and make
Affici not Attici the first word at hand. After all, why would
Hilliard (or his sitter) break the miniature’s lovers’ Latin with
a Greek conceit? A jewel, this limning, a puzzle-poem that
hints at a celestial love secreted by clouds and cropping—
pledged hands not hidden, but clasped within the frame.

Sewing

Gabriela Camerotti, Cinderella, 2007

Such a simple repair, but it sends a chill shiver
down my spine: tightening loose buttons on a
gold & black lace tunic. Fairytale maids whisper
in my ear as I thread the needle, pricking me,
singing, “What’s buttoned tight can be undone,
sew it right or away it’ll run.” Is that spark and
crackle at my fingertips just static electricity, or
something deeper, something that’ll pierce us
and stitch us to time, to all the oldest stories?

Asymptosy

New fruiting bodies pop up from my compost
heap of language, like this one—asymptote—
and I’m torn between putting it in my basket,
or leaving it to shake its fungal head and toss
spores windward. Oh, okay then, I’ll reach for
the word. But slow. Slower. Hand ever closer
but not. Quite. Grasping it, at all—a geometer
I’m not. Yet there are other paths. Desire, like
an asymptote, is “always approaching, never
arriving;” but even a spore will find its way to
germinate, once it’s blown clear of the graph.

Tagetes lucida

It’s a Western plant, all right. The only thing Old World
about this little scruffy shrub has been grafted onto its
name: Tages, the prophet who appeared at plow-time
and taught the Etruscans divination, who’d brought light
alongside him within the anise-scented leaves. But his
influence in the New World is limited. The Guatemalan
and Mexican grandmothers have ideas of their own as
to what to do with this gift, and there’s not much use
for an old prophet from another place and time when
their santos live now, know them each by name. Folks
to heal, children to nurse, meat roasting: old Tages must
sit outside the jacal until the grannies call him to help.

Play

Horia Varlan, "Crude chalk drawing of a boat," 2008.

All children draw, if they have a way to do so.
Chalk on a sidewalk; a rock small enough to fit
a little hand, hard enough to scratch away the
desert varnish from a cliff; a stick in wet sand.
Now we are older, you and I, and carry caveats
in our pockets instead of the treasures we’d
find in the woods. But still, still, I sometimes
palm a piece of flint and leave a mark for you
on the soft limestone: a little sun or a heart,
ready to fill with a trickle from the seep that
softens the caliche; play, to guide you home.

Construction

The tensioned rebar remembers the furnace, and the
furnace remembers its refractory bricks. This garage,
its nested voids skinned in cast concrete, remembers
the weeds that once patched the alkaline soil: a caliche
blanket snatched away before the garage could dream.

The interlocked slabs that make the garage an empty
vessel are kin to those cast alongside the highway. At
dusk, those flat planes lay open like palms to a fortune-
teller, the seams like lifelines waiting to be traced by a
patterned, rusted finger. This evening, a visitor: a lone
woman dancing slow, measured flamenco arabesques;
her boot-heels stamp out a rock-dust duende, consoling
the weeping concrete for what it can no longer dream.

Meadowlark

Photo by Alex Galt/USFWS, 2015.

A slow walk along piled riprap that’s holding back
the waters. Is it an embankment for an earthen dam,
or the lip of an ancient monster’s water-jug, half-
buried in an avalanche of oyster shells cast off after
feasting, still sharp underfoot? Both could be true.
I listen as the wind stuffs my ears with a dizzy racket:
rattle of blown cattail spikes, gimlet-eyed grackles’
whistlings. Then a gift at my feet, perfect, unmoving—
a sulphur butterfly, legs folded, not long dead. I’m
its only mourner, in the absence of a meadowlark.

V. Meurent

Source image: "Ferns at the Royal Melbourne
Botanical Gardens" by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos

Unwinding myself. Much like the string that
makes nautiloid arcs in the geometers’s texts,
I’m pulled just tight enough to sing if stroked.
“Let’s practice drawing involutes freehand!”
I’d say, and you’d reply with a smile, pointing
towards a fern uncurling at our bare feet. It’s
not an involute curve, true, but this soft green
volute unwinds us out; its center so far from
the geometer, so very close to where we lay.

Model

Édouard Manet, "Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe," 1862-63.

Not a simulacrum, sitting here wearing
nothing except your gaze on my skin,
but the X-factor in the work: it can’t be
done without me. The room smells like
turps, linseed oil, wooden stretcher bars,
and sweat. Those single-pane windows
sieve the light, let in the cold, but I don’t
feel the chill. A galaxy of hot lamps circle
me like little suns, put me at the center
of this universe where I’m neither subject
nor object, but co-author: the one not
holding the brush, the one who embodies
the question of what’s being, and what’s
represented, in that fresh, gliding stroke.

Trivia

Liz West, "Junk Drawer," 2013.

It’s like a junk drawer in here, full of
obscure treasures, broken toys, books
I’d forgotten (whether to read them or
what I’d read, well, I forget that too.)
I reach in, back to the back, and find
there is no end to it. The drawer goes
on, the cabinet deepens, and I grow
smaller, lever myself up by brass pulls
and fall in. Socks make a soft landing.

Forty questions later, the jinn pause,
wait to hear what I’ll say in response
to the next question. That question is
the one unasked: the one to which the
only answer is laughter and joy, here
in the endless junk drawer of memory
where the jinn circle our stories, glow,
burn without charring bits of our lost
childhood, the forts in the forest, all
the fine trivia and pocket-lint of love.

Awl

Peacock feather on the ground

You can’t stitch together what’s not been pierced,
and these memories do pierce me. I bind them up,
chain-sewn through the piercings, and think about
those scraps of Moroccan leather you had tooled
with an awl—what a beautiful, wine-dark cover
they’d have made for this retelling of our stories.

Except we didn’t really tell stories, did we? No, we
sat together, dug Johnson grass out of your garden
together, watched the late afternoon light as it left
gold coins strewn on your living room rug, together.

My friend, my friend, it always seems that if I had
the right set of tools, I could take that lock, finesse
it open, that lock that keeps thee from me. But I
don’t, I can’t. And anyway, you’d laugh and tell me
to get outside where the rain lilies are blooming,
use that dull awl to punch holes in the caliche, plant
some lily seeds and some fresh, feathered dreams.

Cascarones

"Easter Morning: Battle of the Cascarones," Arianne, 2011.

They say that Marco Polo brought the idea
of cascarones from China back to Venice, but
if he did, what might have been the reason?
Surely the Venetians knew how to pitch woo
without needing to toss perfume-filled eggs
at their lovers. Regardless, cascarones are here
now, having travelled from Italy to Spain to
Mexico to San Antonio to my neighbors’ homes,
these tissue-papered eggs of love & luck filled
with confetti that teases and marks the beloved
at every breakage. So if cascarones were a poem,
what would they mean? “It’s good luck to break
a fragile thing”? No, I doubt that. I’ll go with this:
“Love plays with you, marks you, gets in your hair.”

Patrimony

Tilda Dalunde, "Collecting toes
(In case of emergency)"

This is where we place the fingertips
of the children we lost to sharp knives,
to guns, to bombs. See, they fit so neatly
in rows in this vestibule, these dusky blue
reminders of what’s become so broken.
Such tiny fingernails. The crescent moon
in each is receding, as if it’s drifting far,
far away, taking a child with it, over the
fence that surrounds the pocked yard,
up past the clouds. The light’s gone out,
it’s been shot out, the shrinking moon
hiding its face behind those fingertips.

Improvisation

From Otto Wilhelm Thomé,
"Flora von Deutschland, Österreich
und der Schweiz." 1885, Gera,
Germany, via Biblio.

The log in the middle of the creek
doesn’t seem firmly seated; neither
am I, leaning out over loose rolling
gravel for a better idea of how to
cross. There’s the balance point: a
place where the shadow beneath
the broken trunk underlines the
soggy bark, scribes the creek-bed.
No gap, but it’s off-center enough
to need me to be light-footed, a
barefoot dancer on what’d pivot
and throw me. I don’t trust my
body, don’t trust that I can be
single-minded enough to commit
with sufficient speed and grace.
I waver then wind moves the cane
nearby, telling me how it could
be done: first, cut a stalk almost
twice my height, tie my shoes to it.
Then take off my socks, put them
in my shoes, step up and, balance
pole low and in hand, let bare feet
read the bark while I keep my gaze
moving from horizon to log and
back. My shadow is an elongated
asterisk on the water below as I
find my footing, one step after an
unsteady other, until I look down
and see I’ve finally crossed.

Semiplume

We saw the hunter before we saw
the pheasant—a man far off down
the trail, bright orange hat, rifle in
hand, walking towards us. Then we
saw the bird. It stepped deliberately
near and ahead of us, towards the
hunter and directly along an invisible
line between where we came from
and where the hunter was heading,
as if we three, my brother and I and
the pheasant, had gone for a stroll
together, the pheasant a friend of the
family taking a slow constitutional with
us after dinner. My brother waved at
the hunter, to be sure we—not just
the bird—had been seen. We had.
We got a measured nod, as if to both
acknowledge us and to compliment
the pheasant on its skill, and then the
hunter abruptly veered off the trail;
a dog, his dog, had found something
to flag in the brush. A sharp exhale (I’d
been holding my breath), and then a
look down at a tangle of soft color.
I'd found a scattered handful of torn
feathers—stiff contour feathers and
downy semiplumes—from another
pheasant. There was a small smear
of blood at the base of one shaft. I
looked up at my brother just in time
to see our friend startle, dart away.