Hold

Juan Sánchez Cotán, "Still Life with Game Fowl,
Vegetables and Fruits," 1602

I’ll sit and wait for a while, dark sliver of a moon
overhead, a shadow on shadow, a fermata. I’m
at an impasse, the land tilting up ever so slightly,
just enough to wear me down, and I cannot hold
on to myself. Can’t hold, so I’m falling. Full stop.

There is a castle in Granada, Bibataubín: it hasn’t
a hold, or keep. Near it, a rondilla from Cervantes,
where shady folk would cut a purse, where honest
folk would lose their compass. I’m on hold. Finally,
I put the phone back in its cradle, ending the music.

In the center of the fullness of things, an emptiness.
In the emptiness, that’s where the mystics say Love
is: a dark mirror, a new moon. Only I’m not able to
attend, to pass through the gateless gate: too full of
words, of this sadness, altogether too heavy to hold.

Danaë

"In 1985, a man pulled out a knife in the State Hermitage
Museum in St Petersburg and thrust it in Danaë's lower belly.
He then threw a litre of sulphuric acid over the painting"
"Art attack: defaced artworks from Rothko to Leonardo -
in pictures," The Guardian, 2012, photo by A. Demianchuk

Rembrandt van Rijn, "Danaë," c. 1636,
The State Hermitage Museum

Not cold coin, wicking up the heat of her body,
but light, golden and quickening, falling on her
belly, her breasts, her hips and thighs. And oh,
that aperture through which Zeus’s light does
pass: a shape echoed by her soft lips, a gaze so
open towards divine desire outside the frame.
Even after that madman’s knife and acid bath,
Zeus’s light pours like honey over Danaë; even
after her dozen years of healing, she’s changed
but not diminished, and welcomes the god as if
it was the very first day his light surprised her.

Critique

USDA, "Rim Fire," 2013

We’re parsing the structure of argument;
there are men wearing ties, yelling on TV,
or men wearing open-collar shirts, yelling
across the Internet, who have no need of
our thoughtfulness. Our scruples. Anger is
what they need; we refuse them, opt out
of screed, of tantrum, we must be better
than that. Those were the days when the
fires spread, forced the bears down out of
the hills, dark fur singed and spangled by
bits of glowing ash. Those were the days
when our coolly beautiful arguments, our
firebreaks, were all overrun; precious as a
child’s sketch, now forgotten, left behind
to burn in this charred, abandoned house.

Edging

A downhill slope, and the leaf mold’s edged
in grit. But oh, the long light! Wicking up-trail,
soaking into the sand, its gold rising as I step
down to packed silt. I watch a wake roll past,
tracing its lattice of arcs on dark mud at the
river edge; it’s not far now to willow, to black
cottonwood and snowberry, the edging for a
beaten-gold path, one that might lead home.

Workout sketch 1

There’s no easy uplift; gravity pulls hard on me.
I try to rise, can’t get free of the ground; these
ridges tug at my knees, my ankles. The air, which
should be thinner, thickens, as if my breath came
through a straw, from deep within a cave. It is all
work, this. My body is the stone of Sisyphus, as
I push myself up, and up. The one thing I’ll do is
what I know how to do, to NOT STOP. At the top,
finally, muscles knotting along my ribs, sternum;
now I follow the trail widdershins, as if unwinding
myself, unwinding these years and the mountain,
until I pass a point I’ve marked for my return leg,
elevation receding like a tide, its whirlpool trail
carrying the stone of my body down, and down.

Turquoise

Hamon jp, "Zanskarie woman wearing a perak
(traditional headdress) composed of turquoises
(Zanskar)," 1991

In Old French it was called Turkish stone,
a conflation of those who’d traded the
gems with the gem itself: the sky, dug by
hand in Persia. The Diné also know this
stone, how its gender’s male if bluer, or
female when more green. And there are
others still—like a checkout clerk I saw
consoling a woman who’d forgotten her
name, her money, what she was buying,
where she lived—a checkout clerk who,
in brilliant turquoise eyeshadow, told me
she wore the stone, its color to brighten
the gray sadness she saw all around her.
Who could blame her, on her feet all day
at the checkout, this infinite mother of
patience in her raiment of summer sky?

Breakages

Anselm Kiefer, "Breaking of the Vessels," 1990
lead, iron, glass, copper wire, charcoal, and Aquatec;
149 in x 135 1/16 x 57 in; St. Louis Art Museum

We came to live in this small house
with our keepsakes all wrapped up
in bubbles, but I still woke to a place
strewn with glass shards—likely our
cats bumping the new reading lamp,
sending it tumbling against the floor.
The neighbors had their breakages,
too, rocks tossed through two pretty
picture windows (they said “teens,”
or pointed commentary by strangers
angry with change, at us, the world.)
The way a wedding’s sealed by the
glass broken underfoot, or a hand-
blown bottle’s cracked off the pipe
and finished on a pontil rod, it’s the
transferences that are so marked—
deliberate shatterings of the fragile
holds we have on things, each other.

Canopy

I’m as full of changes as a forest at the end
of summer, in its last sweet storing of light
for darker days to come. Me, looking up at
bright clouds through a susurration of that
living canopy, absorbing reflected sunlight
as it moves from eye to third eye, resetting
my internal clocks. And looking back down
at me, frightening but not unkind, I see the
Green Man, in his glowing-skull form, like a
medieval memento mori, Buddhist Citipati,
his gaze steady though the wind blows. We
both know a bit about change and fruition;
both move with, and cross-grained to, time.

Crows

John James Audubon, "American Crow,"
1861, Brooklyn Museum

So I’ve come to the place where I’ll die. If
I’m lucky, this death’s as far off as the time
it will take to walk these mountains up and
down and then up again, feeling soft rains
revive me; long after I’m part of this land,
its hills, the way mycelium feathering the
underside of leaf-duff’s a part of this place,
the way the black basalt is, and those root-
hairs on all the trees whose names do still
escape me. I know this place: it’s where my
endings and beginnings live, where the story
of stories, Scheherazade’s tale, is carried off
by the black crows for whom I lay bread out
every morning, glad as we are to be so alive.

Bristlecone

Dcrjsr, "A large Great Basin Bristlecone
Pine, Pinus longaeva, showing both live
and dead sections," 2010

Fast to catch aflame, and fast to burn, these hills—
and brushfire’s what will come when lightning strikes.
Ashes float on updrafts, turn to dust; still, we’ll hike.
We’ll follow creeks alongside soot-stained rills,

Lay our packs on charred briars’ brittle spikes.
There, we’ll catch a magic fish behind the gills,
feed it bread to tell our fortunes, good or ill,
in the shade of trees that split when lightning strikes.

This land’s as real as our bodies are, which means
it’s all somewhat a dream—an accident of physics,
or a poem, a summer’s fire cracking hardened seeds.
And in the ashes that we walk through, there are greens
that’d make an emerald weep—it’s our life’s matrix,
love, an unquenched fire, an evergreen joy we heed.

Coverture

Patrice Lewis, "Tarping Hay," 2010

Everything is open to the sky—the scrap-wood sheep
pen, the pitted bed of the skewbald pick-up, even the
attic (a missing patch of shingles on the roof make an
accidental skylight)—everything except for a ziggurat
of fresh bales of hay. Once scythed, each alfalfa blade
no longer changes sun and rain and earth into energy,
as free as the rhizome-born can be—now, coverture’s
applied to the hay stacks curing under tarps, the green
fuse subsumed by an agricultural marketplace's needs.

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.