This music—when the alder and maple drop their icy lace handkerchiefs on the soft mud beneath Sol's melting gaze—songs made of streams and cast-off shells, over then under frozen ledges layered and fractured as mica.
This music sings me into silence. No sound but my slow inhale, exhale—I hold still, even when a pebble, frost-heaving down an embankment, splashes, startling me. It's Spring, the creek is playing, tumbling, singing its thawing. So am I.
Amanda Slater, "Dicksonia antarctica, Circinate vernation," 2014
The compost disassembling under fiddlehead leaves, sighing out our collective breaths held since last winter—stretching unfurling croziers to shepherd us from chores to mysteries. Look how the mist rises before sunup, washes out all the color from the gifts I brought you: the lump of sweet butter shaken from cream, jade horns opening from a mat of pixie cup lichens, a loose scrub-jay feather carrying the summer sky. Let's set our old bones on fire, make ourselves a joy- filled crucible for the bud-break post-vernation.
Thorolf Holmboe, "Hekkende skarv (Nesting cormorants)," 1903
I glanced up and saw a smooth spot in the river's current—almost a lens, a focus for my eye, and I watched it. In a moment both fast and slow: the needle-beak piercing the scrim, then the rest of the bird, dark as wet slate, holding the wriggling silver crescent of a fish, or the moon, swallowing it.
Perkons, "Purple Loosestrife," 2017
Also see Meyer's "How the Invasive Plants of New York Represent the City’s Colonial Past"
All potential, a mote, the glossy testa keeping its secrets until the ballast box is scraped empty, until the rains come. And the rains do come, kissing every pursed micropyle until (imbibing and besotted, drunk and stirring) one coat comes loose, splits open. An everyday miracle, an invasion—a radicle nosing down the way a newborn roots, eyes closed tight, for another sweet drink.
Rembrandt van Rijn, "Woman Reading," Date Unknown
In a small stone building, dating back to the Revolutionary War—this was where we went to find treasures hidden within a second skin of foil-stamped buckram, or sheathed in Mylar. My small hand in my father’s. The reverent hush, the mild vanillin-tannic perfume of decomposing lignin, cellulose. This was where time was unbound, where a child like me could run her fingers along a spine then listen in at the grown-ups’ table, sit with ink-stained dinner guests from ages past and to come. I’d bring all my arms could hold up front— my offertory, placed on a librarian’s altar.
simpleinsomnia, "Crying little girl reaches for someone off camera," uploaded 2016
The toddler—red-faced, wild. I can’t recall how we’d soothe her, soothe ourselves. Did we never learn how? Her back stiff and arched, choking as she sobs “NNNnnnoooooo,” perfect tiny hands clenching then opening to flail at the air. Oh, little one. Your cry fades, decays as you’re carried past, carrying me past now and backwards to the edge of perception, to where the audible spectrum dissolves in the backwash of cosmic noise, your tears.
"Drachm of Ephesos with bee, struck under Prytanis," 387–301 BCE, Museum of Fine Arts Boston
Even Charon needs a place to rest, in the stygian twilight—a place to put his feet up, close his eyes for a moment as he waits for the next passengers to appear. A houseboat made of reeds, a gift from Ningal—no, we’d never see it, even if we knew it was there. Sitting low in the water, blackened with tar, sagging from the weight of a thousand million coins given to pay for passage—prow and stern like horns, like the edges of the thinnest crescent of a waxing moon made of obsidian. Floating shelter for the ferryman’s break. When the wind catches a cut edge, the scow moans like a blues harp, the same tuneless tune Charon hums under his breath once back at work, loading. While he misses his moment of leisure, he’ll gladly palm the light off our coins.
Edward Hopper, "Rooms by the Sea," 1951
I’m right there, right here, where that white paint chalks a bit on my hand. Tear-stains at the hinges, from rust, I think—or maybe other pentimenti. (The wind catches on the doorframe, whistles the same tuneless way we’d whistle when we walked through the graveyard past our house.) Its wooden joins, all held together by layers and layers of paint, all ready to disarticulate—the way a deer’s skeleton may fall to pieces after the flesh has gone away. It’s been so long since the doorframe was protection from much of anything. All it can do is point out there once was a difference between outside, and in. And I’m outside, remembering pencil marks made on the doorframe inside, as we grew. Remembering who made them.
Howard Kopp, "Three Sisters and Fog," 2017
There’s none, here where my bare hand brushes the hot skillet handle. Only for a second. The lag time almost countable (“one thun-der, two thun- der”) and a lightning reflex jerks me back—then the boom of pain. In the background, some joke half-heard through my angry “FUCK,” then mild concern raised, a question in the air, which dies down once it’s clear this is a minor injury. O this body, love, is fading into the background. There is a dense fog in the valley near the Sisters. We’ll climb, my singed hand marked by soot from the wildfires, until (like my burn) there’s nothing left to see but our shadows disappearing, sfumato.
Juncos emboss the soft ice-crust beneath the feeder with their footfall. It’d be wrong to read their marks as runes, but (since I’ll make meaning from the most unlikely things—someone else’s cast-off grocery list, vanadium, my scarred skin, a toy dinosaur) I try, and fail. The juncos step lightly—much more lightly than these words piling up at my fingertips; in the time it takes me to fail, they’ve come, and written, and gone.
Unknown photographer, "A beach scene," 2017
At the corners of my eyes, tear stains dry to sand and grit. I walk along tide-pools as a shorebird, in my dreams; I wade through a slow-moving estuary, picking at clams buried in silt mud. I wake and knuckle the crumbs of sleep away until I’m rubbed raw, my own tears stinging me. When I was a child, rheumy-eyed old women would try to hold me— great-grandmothers and other kin—and I shied away. Why was their skin all bristled and bumpy, why were they so wet-eyed? No, I did not want them to kiss me. Clear-eyed, unknowing, I’d run off down the edge of the shore, run past the lace edge of the sea, chasing the sandpipers as I ran.
A little bird tsk-tsk’d me as I stood up, four small stones in hand, near dad’s gravesite. So few Jews here in the memorial park—he would like knowing we’d observed some of the rituals, like placing stones on his marker in remembrance, one for each of us. Me. My brothers. Mom. Every marker alike and not, bronze (such an old, well-travelled metal, wandering past Anatolia to this New World desert), wording raised up the way hope no longer was. The bird flitted mesquite to mesquite, chipping little sounds in the air. And I bent down, touched the dry spiral of a seed pod, traced its curves—then took it with me.
Illustration to Tennyson's "Sleeping Beauty" by W. E. F. Britten, 1901
I wasn’t patient enough to dig beneath each long aorta of taproot, work them free. (All five roses: mystery grafts on knobbled, half-rotten rootstock, thorns set sharp as fairytale briars to bleed the unwary; primary roots fathoms deep in mantle, lateral roots like capillary beds filled with worms.) Yes, I apologized for severing what I couldn’t uproot, and the roses were kind, didn’t prick me even as I cut them, pried them out, lifted them into the air, moved them to more light.
This is how I save my own life. Like Avalokitesvara, I listen for the cries of the world. But in my smallness, I can only listen for small things, for what’s feral.
The faint chirr of crickets; a sunfish’s slap and plop (fish as clumsy skimmed stone, dodging an egret.) Bullfrogs. A red-tailed hawk’s descending scream. And a great blue heron rising, its wings unfurling, luffing.
Image from Tashi Tobgyal's "The Inside Story: Rathole Coal Mining in the Jaintia Hills," 2012
The creosote smell of old railroad ties at the shaft’s entrance, the long slow seepage from the adit. There’s not much light— a rusty slice of moon drowning in an acid pond. My headlamp. I look and find a heap of fool’s gold has weathered, turned the water into something that’ll burn the skin off my bones. Here is nowhere, and here’s where I find myself—in a place where the scroll’s worn off the auger, dull as a stained pile of tailings.
NASA / SwRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstädt / Seán Doran, "Junocam PeriJove 9," © CC NC SA
At a touch, I fly out past the borderland of my skin, through arcs of tropospheric blue. It takes a moment to orient. I tumble on a ghost rappel, pinwheel as home—an agate marble—shrinks behind me. Just like that, I pass Juno and Jupiter, whose storms roil so beautifully, all pearls into liquid nacre—then further, faster, so fast emptiness becomes a sound, light pouring through me. Time pools at the edge of things where things leave off their skins. Makes of us a holy, formless joy.
Caravaggio, detail from "David con la testa di Golia," 1606-07
Bellowing, enraged by the scrawny boy standing out of range, unable to see him (did the sun come out from behind a cloud?) or to see what was next: his death. Caravaggio mirrored himself, slack-mouthed and bleeding, in the giant; and I, caught in the net of a dream with Caravaggio’s Goliath raging, I was frozen, no sling at hand, waiting for my terror to pass, waiting for rescue. I woke, gasping. If I could slip back into those starlit waters and redream the terrible dream, I’d raise my right hand slowly, blur the story’s edges with abhayamudrā, then wait until the giant—heaving, anguished, broken—became a fountain of tears.
SeppVei, "A forest ditch in Utajärvi, Finland," 2009
The open hand, grasping at nothing but air—a memory pulled up by the roots, dirt still clinging to it. I don’t say too (“cat got your tongue?”) much, no one wants to know what’s on my mind, lyrics to a misremembered song. I’ll break it down for you. Went too fast, lost my grip, pitched forward, I’m falling. There’s a long old ditch hidden in those weeds. Where I fell, it looked like a grave; berm to barrow, too surprised to cry yet, but I’m slick with blood and dew.
NASA, "The Rare Venus Transit," 2008
This week, a memory: of my dad’s gaze sliding over our faces, unable to focus.
A doctor asked him, “And where are you today, Bob?” A small chortle, because it
was an easy question: “I’m in a hospital.” “But where—what city?” His gaze slowly
drifting to the left, then right. “Hospital.” It was as if he were receding, swept out
to sea by a spring tide, a tangled current. “Yes, but the city?” “I’m in…” (a minute
passes) “…Connecticut.” He was, but we weren’t. We were in Scottsdale with him,
the radiant April sun laughing at our frail bodies, our mayfly lives. He had been in
Connecticut when he was a boy, visiting family there, and he could tell he’d given
the wrong answer by our stricken looks. That’s when he knew how lost he was—
there were no maps for this journey, the way forward over the edge of the world.
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.
