Ken Clifton, "Anna's Hummingbird on nest," 2008
Spiderwebs, gathered in a skein then drawn out by the needle of beak. One tap, and a push: she sticks another bit of moss in place, patchworked with lichen, a hidden nursery where she’ll warm her warrior children until they hatch into endless appetite. Her body burns off a scrim of frost. She nests, shivering, held by her private compulsions, the small goddess waiting for her twins to arrive.
Glen Scott, "Ice Explosion," 2006
I walked over a ridge, and saw what we’d heard the day before, thinking it was transformers that had blown: full-grown fir and spruce, shattered where sap froze and burst them, splinters staking outlines around each fallen tree as if some drunk carny axe-thrower’s fever dream had come true. The science I read later, about the fluid mechanics of these deaths, was impenetrable. All I absorbed— sapwood’s osmotic streams became the point of failure; heartwood, impervious, then blew apart.
"Paracas textile 179," c. 2500 BCE, via the Gothenburg Collection
The air that held what songs were sung was descant, desiccant, wicking all singers' breaths away as each chanted those bundled corpses down into a dropped, earthen womb. Wind blew across each singer’s mouth, all becoming reed flutes piping over those who died; sand scoured mouths dry, little cups waiting for a rinse of maize beer after singing. This desert by the sea parches every body until, husked in pierce-work cloaks, they become seed corn, dried and stored for a new season’s planting.
Bowl, earthenware, painted in blue on opaque white glaze, 9th century
It was no accident that slipped tin and lead onto an earthenware skin— rather, a someone who knew how to bring the white clouds down to sit on the clay. One trader may buy up the whole lot for its novelty, no telling, but the maker had a bigger game in mind. Tin for Jupiter, lead for Saturn, fired hotter than a kiln, forge-hot, melting Venus’s copper cestus if she’d let it; and then slow to cool. Alchemy turned the pottery gloss white, the perfect ground for figures and brushwork—something tough enough to take the flame and not crack in two, and yet a thing too fragile for a trader’s carpet-packing.
T. Luong Son, "Một Buổi Tối Ở Quê Nhà / One Evening at Home," 2010
That pot-holed asphalt, a patchwork basin caching the neighbor’s porch-light. Outside my bedroom window, it’s raining; cars pass, shushing themselves as they go, and I recall when I was six, how I’d watch a single slant beam travel, play chase along my bedroom wall. My world now is a platinum print, all silver light and pitch-dark shadow. The child I was sits with me; we count the cars going by, as they play their magic lantern shows.
Peeter van Bredael, "Commedia dell'arte Scene in an Italian Landscape," date unknown
There they are, the Columbines and Harlequins playing behind every Doctor’s back, and here we are, indentured, pressed into service, legion. If we’re a hundred, or a hundred times a hundred, it makes no difference. You and I, wearing dull black, sweating as we pull the drapery back, un- furling backdrops. It’s us who’ll loose the knots on the ballast of ponderous argument, sandbags to tie the rococo confection down. Even tasked with curtain calls countless as the stars, we’ll do our job, dash through hidden crossovers to haul away that gold-braided bloody velvet, reveal the troupe—roses tossed, as they take infinite bows. And while that job’s doing, we’ll whisper its end.
Daniel E. Coe, "Willamette River Historical Stream Channels, Oregon," Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries
Small things that I’ve carried from my last home—a finger-worn post oak acorn, the seahorse husk of a gulf fritillary’s chrysalis— don’t figure in my dreams, here. The turbid water won’t hold my reflection, but holds instead its pale centenarians, white-bellied, mud-veiled, as they nose its soft silted bed for those secrets a river would keep to itself.
Theodor van Thulden, "The Works of Ulysses: 'The Greek sailors open the bag, given by Aeolus, containing adverse winds.'"
If we whisper “Ozymandias,” apotropaic magic to bring all haboobs to bear on our new monument makers, we do it knowing the wind’ll hear us. An inclined slant of a wall of mud and sand, an exhalation of a collapsing thunderstorm: the blowing grit scours paint right off a car, etches mirrors, mutes every gilded entryway; will strip the mall palms bare.
Derzno, "Hohler Fels," 2011
An exhalation, detoured at fresh hollows where quill knobs had marked the spot to place the awl, pierce the bone, open “o”s for fingertips. Breath takes wing in a rising half-note, descending overtones, like bird song. Who disassembled the eater of the dead, pulled its feathers out until barren bone gleamed, then thought to call down the sky and sing through it? Who put this bone flute in a midden, broken, buried, as we’ll all be, when all our songs are gone?
A gull, washed in gold as it lifts into sunlight— in a moment, gone from view.
This morning finds me in sleep’s shadow, as I watch for those birds you’ll never see.
Alan Vernon, "Female Costa's Hummingbird," 2011
Eye to eye, she tells me wring more sweetness from the sun, bring it now. She cannot wait. Outrunning her shadow costs her; at night, she won’t sleep, she’ll step into a future death just a little, her torpor a ruse to outwit the killing cold. As I make fresh nectar, I tell her a story—the ancestral brothers, kin to the god of war, skinned for the glory of kings. She has no truck with that, imagines a new home to nest in—a royal beating heart, exsanguinated, extirpated by the same beak whose feather-tongue kisses the red dahlia, the sunflower.
Inka-Chincha jar with human face and corn feet, 1450–1532 CE. Photo by Ernest Amoroso, NMAI.
There’s nothing I can say in my own tongue, with my own tongue, within my imagined memory. I have a sugar cube clenched between my teeth for the glass of tea my great-grandfather’s ghost needs. The bitter taste of what I can’t say: it’s not appropriate; don’t. So I’ll use my oldest silver to borrow a cup from other poets, beg a mouth to speak. How I’d spit sugar, appropriate their heat to warm my dead beloveds.
Antoine Vollon, "Mound of Butter," 1875–85
These are special, these effects. As I pass through the magicked mirror and out another side, become light, my doppelgänger sees what I don’t: how CGI ants swollen on honeydew feed their imagined queen; pools of code where cellular automata swim, breed. Presence, here, is an artifact shaped by attention paid elsewhere. I gaze, touching metal not wood, as the shining simulacrum places silver coins on my eyes, the better to see something that’s not quite me with.
Cai Guo-Qiang, "Saraab, Endless," 2011; photo by Hiro Ihara, courtesy Cai Studio
In this fog, it’s unclear where the anchor lays. Pulling on the frayed rope, and everything yielding, so: nothing at the end of it. The wash of gray-green harbor water licking the bow, or the blood-rush in my ears, I can’t tell which; they sound the same. Unmoored, I drift past the harbor’s mouth, so far past I can no longer hear my own voice.
Jervis McEntee, "The Hudson River Valley," c. 1874
Not sky-clad, but almost: washed with white gold from head to foot in the weak winter light. We lay dovetailed, watching the sun rise and kiss us both, stars settling under the cloud cover. Were we ever that young, then—will we ever be so young again? What they know about focus, those image-makers, won’t help them see: though we dim with age, my beloved and I; so radiant within our jeweled bokeh.
A stoat in winter pelage guarding a mountain hare carcass from a pair of least weasels
“...and soe is the shell gold, being dry and burnisht with the small tooth of a weasel fastned into a stick.” From "Miniatura; or, The art of limning," by Edward Norgate, c. 1627
The kit provides itself sharp edges, all erupting from buds near time of first weaning, pushed out, as baby teeth will be, when larger knives replace its nursing set. Imagine a farmer, then, who’d caught and killed a weasel, learning its canine tooth, the dagger that bled his rabbits dry, would burnish some great lord’s portrait. And the wild creature, its joy in killing as pure as shell gold, sold in pieces for its fur, for art.
Bildersturm: Damaged relief statues in the Cathedral of Saint Martin, Utrecht; photo by Arktos, 2003
The conservator, making restoration of all that had been scraped away, binding soft red poliment with rabbit skin glue: this pillow of clay upon which the Mother of God will again rest. The image, gouged down to bare parchment years after its making, an act of literal defacing, an iconoclasm. Unhallowed. The Mother’s face will be restored, but first—light. Slow gentle work, mounding the bole then sanding it, smoothing it. Later, a full warm breath from this living woman revives the surface so it can embrace a skin of light: the golden circle remade, unbroken.
"I had always heard that native people believe that photographs steal their souls, and here I learned that in Kayapo, 'akaron kaba' not only means 'to take a photo' but that it also means 'to steal a soul.'" From "Capturing souls," by Ricardo Moraes, 2011
A person walks down a street alongside their story, hand-in-hand with their protagonist, themself. One finds one’s character compelling, as do others, soon there are strobe lights. Your surface—skin, clothing, the ways you breathe out and in—are caught, teased apart, made absolute. Wading through a cold stream of attention, unseen teeth tearing off tiny bits of you. The aperture closes, swipes your soul, plagiarizing a last bit of flesh and turning it to pixels. “You” now is the story you walked alongside, as hollow as a reed, the text-slash-reader impressing the facsimile “you.” Nothing warm; nothing left with which to soul kiss.
Still (cropped) from "Rain Room" video, Random International, 2013
A glimpse, then, at the edge of a puddle. Skin white as the gibbous moon, radiant and cold; her glance up at me, appraising. A frog stalked by a heron would feel the same chill I did. She knows she’s soulless, no opening for anything imperfect as our finite warmth, or stories that have endings. A warm thermal footprint draws her attention: a young man walking. Marriage? No, those tales are wrong. It’s a wish to join a world of change, be pierced, made permeable. She's silvering the asphalt beneath his feet. A shift in the clouds, and an impossible sight— perfect beauty, soaked by the rain—stops him.
Gordon T. Taylor, "Diatoms: NOAA At The Ends of the Earth," 1983
My fingertips, light on a jelly jar, yours near mine, as we raise the dead—these are the things we’d do for art. We didn’t think to ask after our dead beloveds, then. I
wish now we had, not to disturb our fond dead, but to have taken comfort in a longer good-bye. We who stumble through uncertainty
in our shape-shifting skins—watch as the glass rings each letter, fast then faster, “L” then “O,” dancing towards “V” and “E,” then “U.” An
alphabet, spelling wishes as gifts; arabesques of touch/no-touch, all our longing, scribed in tempos as intimate, familiar as a heartbeat.
The other side of the board, the side the cup doesn’t glide upon, is lit in the absence of light—pin- pricked with souls, as improbable as joy, as beautiful as diatoms.
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