Castaway

Diego Delso, "Geysers of Tatio, San Pedro de Atacama, Chile," 2016

My footprints have been swept clean away
by the wind. Do I know where I am? Yes,
I know. I am here. I am lost. And the sun
is high in its arc, its shadows cast black as
pips on white dice, the dice I tossed when
I set forth, Audaces fortuna iuvat. Mouth
as dry as the scree on this downslope. I
wonder, now, if Virgil made a bleak joke
in giving those words to a man who loses
and dies. We all die. In dying, lose touch.
The talus slope underfoot shifts, slides—
and I lose touch with where, how I began.

Bud-break

John Rusk, "Trillium chloropetalum," 2014

Darkness is almost absolute in the understory.
Here, where I don’t cast a shadow, where the
Catherine wheel of needled branches breaks
the winter sunlight on its way down, bleeds it
of warmth til it’s frayed and pale as mycelium.
Near where summer’s wildfires stained our lips
with tarry soot, made it impossible to speak.

But this is how we’re born, from this darkness.
Juncos tell me seeds have burst their jackets so
they must fly towards higher ground, the rising
wind lifting them like samaras above the earth,
away, away—and here, love, the understory’s
long night is now starred with white trillium, a
scent that pitches me headlong into bud-break.

Geodesy

"As Earth spins, its shape is slightly flattened into an ellipsoid, so that there is a greater distance between the centre of Earth and the surface at the equator, than the centre of Earth and the surface at the poles. This bigger distance, coupled with the rotation of Earth, results in the force of gravity being weaker at the equator than at the poles."

The shape of the world: pushed down
by its spin, “a flattened ellipsoid.” As if
a potter’s wet hands, while centering clay
on the wheel, let the rotation take over,
as if they stepped away to get a fresh cup
of tea, as if the spinning clay gathered a
wisp of the earth’s magnetic field to itself—
a cloud condensing, a blanket against the
solar wind—and made an atmosphere.
As if the potter returned as a goddess, a
geologist or mathematician, the maker re-
making, remade by the shape of the world.

Eschatology

Takeuchi Seihō, Spring Snow (Shunsetsu), 1942

The crow with a broken primary feather limping
up the drive, angling for a cheese cracker. Or the
neighbor’s fat chickens, bringing death to grubs.
A week ago, two puddles of thickening blood on
the porch; later, while weeding, I saw a sack, no,
the pink hairless remains of a rat, under lavender.
I’m tangled up in other people’s stories about the
end of things. They’re frayed, threadbare stories,
having no crow, no chickens, no grubs, no rat, yet
they nettle me. Lilliputian thread, cobwebs from a
dead god’s crypt; I shudder as they brush my face.

Ribes

"Artemis of Ephesus." Statue from the Amphitheater
of Lepcis Magna, photograph by Marco Prins.

In early spring, the white flowering currant. Artemis Ephesia,
egg-breasted Lady pale as the moon, as the marble under
your lost paint, when bud-break came, did your followers
sit at your feet, drowsy as bees in torpor? I lean close, bend
towards the pendant blossoms. Couldn’t be indecorum in this
wet land, it’s the same sweet scent as blood-red sanguineum.

Blur

(OvO), "The trees have eyes and they've
gathered to watch our fleeting lives," 2013

My gaze, beloved, doesn’t hold fast any longer. It
flickers like a hummingbird’s tongue, nystagmus
kissing the snowdrops as I bend to look close, so
close extra gravity tugs at me, softens the ground
underfoot. I catch myself, widen my stance but it’s
too late, I’m set down in mulch and mud, breathing
in what the wood chips exhale—lignin, resin, vanillin,
my nose in the book of shredded trees. It’s a blur,
this life, rising on the wind, falling at moonset, and
I still look to touch it mid-flight, to steady my gaze.

Recipe

Daniel Beilinson, "Khimki Forest," 2011

We’d starve if we couldn’t stomach the
bitterness. Even after a soak, that cold
stream hadn’t washed out enough from
acorn and oak to unbind the tongue, but
we must eat. (Our hard-times bread not
much more than a mush, but oh how we
lapped up its flint edge.) Flux may kill us?
Then we’ll take our water pink with wine.
(The recipe calls for more than Kore’s six
seeds to ferment a blood red prairie Lethe.
Husks added for a tannic brace, a taste of
exile.) We’d die if we fed ourselves with
all we thought we knew, who we thought
we were, those sweet easy times before—
and we’ll die if we ever, finally, forget them.

Profligate geometries

zeevveez, "Gnat Balls (2)," 2013

Every day, about an hour before sunset,
a cloud of small insects floats, Brownian
and swirling, near the apex of an invisible
pyramid (the base, a complex alignment
of dahlias, catmint, three red flowering
currants; the edges, outlined by shadows
cast from a small ash tree). They’ll dance,
then disperse. Their beautiful anonymity
is my conceit (I’m not meant to listen to
their olfactory small talk), their spiraling
without touching an artifact of my line of
sight (I’m certain they’ll touch, why else
dance?)—profligate geometries, purpose
unknown, life-giving, nourishing delight.

Etiquette

I whisper my apologies to the dead sotto
voce, here where moss and lichens mottle
more than one child’s name. Is it common
courtesy or superstition, to ask those buried
for forgiveness as I walk on their graves? Is
it something that can be forgiven, that I find
beauty in the way the rain dissolves a death
date carved in stone, in how spores latch on
and bloom, life latticing across the markers,
dissolving all remembrance into forgetting?

Pitch

I’m a tarpit into which every moment falls—
sunlight raking across bricks and into broken
windows of a warehouse along the Hudson;
that bramble thorn piercing the cupid’s bow
of my lip, kissing me bloody when I was seven;
the gauze of my great-grandmother’s cotton
dress as I tried to dodge her bristly kisses. (All
week, all I hadn’t known I’d remembered has
bubbled up like methane through bitumen.)
I’m an asphalt seep, a dark iridescence where
an infinite number of memories have massed
and caught fire, thin flames licking my skin.

Fritillaries and emperors

Photo by Kevin Faccenda

Where I live, the alder leaves are dropping—
banked sunlight paid up from longer days,
fugitive gold weighting them down until, at
the first north wind, they give up their grip.
But I’ve gone somewhere else, gone to an
open-air memory palace, those mud sloughs
framed with live oak that won’t shed until
spring. Instead of leaves, gulf fritillaries and
hackberry emperors tumble on past, updraft
and down, dusting the same air that’ll carry
me over remembered land—monarch paths
through the chaparral, swallowtails flitting
though mountain passes—until I’m home.

Zigzag

I wanted to walk down to the river, had to pick
my way sideways on the slick path, a labyrinth
downslope. The dead white of mushrooms I’d
crushed while sliding down, shredding at the
slightest touch. The mottled, blood red leaves
under a big-leaf maple. And, a glimmer—bright
brass casing for a .32 caliber bullet, near-gold
against my dirty fingers. It was new not muddy.
I kept it near where a shard of sky resolved into
a crenellated sheet of metal, melted, reformed
around crushed, silvered glass. Buried treasure.
The faint smell of smoke from the damp charcoal
I scraped off the ruins. At the edge of the highway,
at the edge of the forest, a car fire must’ve caught
two trees—one left and sawn down, one burnt yet
still standing. As we are, as we do, in our walking
down to the river, which is itself a kind of prayer.

Pet

Charles Soule, Jr., "Boy with Dog," 1860-65

I'd imagined she’d been called far worse names
than bitch, the biting curses almost forgotten
now. She was with him, she was for him, his
protection from loneliness, the depredations
of his living rough, broken—spine skewed, skin
inked over, blurry mementos of his other lives.
(The tie that binds is sometimes a frayed rope
loosely tied around a neck, as worn and soft as
his gaze towards her, how softly he’d spoken.)
Her name was Chevelle Marie, and I thought
she might’ve been named for the last finest
joy he’d known—a car, a girl—a boyhood lost
and found in a dark gray blocky pit-bull. (I told
her she was pretty; she wriggled all over with
delight.) Chevelle Marie was a good dog; she’d
listen, then lead him out of Hades if she could.

Willamette

The silt-slipped skin off a mounded barrow
clouding inlets as the rain carries a wet dust
down, tears mixed with mud on my cheeks.
Deckled edges—oak and cottonwood leaves
turning to coal, slime mold tumuli, drowned
grass. A slick of algae greases where I stand,
so I straddle a tine of tarnished water—a rill
forking from creek into river—unsteady on
a fallen branch. (The crows above me all see
how the river bisects me, how it seeps right
through me, all the chambers of my heart.)

Late afternoon

H. Pellikka, "Kaleidoscope," 2005

Dream-memory fragments, crumbs left
in the bottom of a sack full of childhood
places—as if I had eaten them all, as if
I could. Places I’ve lived, sweet and salty
as popcorn disappearing on my tongue:
dandelions pushing aside a sidewalk, or
naphthene aromatics from a fresh-oiled
asphalt road. Late summer in Rockland
County, shot through with veins of light
from Lake Mary near Flagstaff. The lost
bits of towns and cities. (I wake from my
nap, finger the broken pieces still muzzy
from sleep, lick the salt off my fingertips
from whose tears I don’t, can’t recall.)

Friday

The cat sits glowing in the sunlight that pools
on the bed. She’s forgotten to tuck her tongue
in after licking my thumb, and leans into my
hand, and purrs. The sun teases her (she’s so
damp, cowlicked from her ablutions), setting
opalescent diadems that catch in her fur. Out
the window, every green leaf’s now a peridot—
the bees rise then set on tourmaline fireweed.

Gorgoneion

Faye Wei Wei, "To prepare a face to meet the faces
that you meet," 2017, courtesy Cob Gallery

I was searching for a word for this epoch,
our American anti-epithalamium, every
stinking breakage a muddy defilement of
our marriage bed—the marriage of polity,
one to another in community, neighbors
whose goodwill is now mocked, kindness
dragged half-naked from her home then
whipped through the streets. I dreamt of
the lexicon Sappho’d put under her pillow
to keep it safe from the outrages of this
present future—I’d like to weep; I won’t.
Instead I’ll find a tow sack and gather up
rattlesnakes, whisper the Gorgon’s name
to them, turn them loose, then watch as
every cheap imported Gadsden flag turns
those who’d break our bonds, to stone.

Catch

dcJohn, "ball and glove," 2005

The ball was as big as the sun and smelled like
glove oil, and leather, and fresh cut grass, and
I could barely hold it in my too-large mitt. The
sound, when it hit the pocket just right—a soft
cough of air; a single, hollow-palmed clap. My
dad, smiling, happy, playing catch with me. He’s
receding now, that memory pulling away like a
stagehand’s trick curtain, overlaid with news of
children who’re as old as I was then (maybe six,
seven) all sobbing for their mommas, their dads,
children tossed up into bright desert air, falling
among strangers in a nightmare game of catch.

Yardwork

As I soak the ground where the clay’s
packed tight at the trunk, loosen its
chokehold, soften it, a thousand tiny
black ants bubble up—this chitinous
fountain, ants clutching pale seeds of
larvae, bodies profligate as the tree’s
yellow blooms. The ants, as ordered
in their panicked disorder as the beat
of my racing heart. I shudder—they’re
hidden again. The afternoon sun gnaws
links off the laburnum’s golden chains
until they’re licked up by a north wind,
dust devil of petals spiraling. Drifts of
petals, gilding the asphalt as a fat bee
settles, dozes off beneath a leaf. If only
you were here to see all this with me.

Transparent

Thomas Howison, sketch of a gnarled and
fallen apple tree, from an 1820 lithograph

My guess is, she was planted when the
cottage was built. Almost a centenarian,
neglected long enough that her water-
spouts were almost thick as her central
trunk; one low heavy limb snapped clear
off from the weight of her apples. That
was just after we’d bought the cottage,
before we’d moved in. She covered our
yard with windfalls; the cottage smelled
like cider for weeks, and it struck me,
how her generosity almost broke her.