Inheritance (A cadralor)

David J. Stang, "Piper auratum," 2007

1.
The ends of my fingers smell like clay
and hoja santa. It’s leftovers for supper
after digging in the dirt, the grit between
my teeth extra spice for the mole verde.
My mood? Nixtamal blue, bitter, alkaline.

2.
I’m trapped, I’m free, I’m old and dying, a shock
to myself, someone’s baby left to freeze on a hill.
See those bones bent at the edge of the woods,
a soul dowsing for a womb. The fall wind stutters,
turns itself inside out for me, then scours me pink.

3.
Radio sending me the right beat for a slow
shuffle, a gliding two-step around the living
room and I start to dance but it’s just me, so
I stop. When did I last dance with my fingers
laced through a stranger’s belt loops, formal
yet intimate, wheeling, an orrery in sawdust?

4.
Nostalgias seize me the way demons seized
St. Anthony, lifting me up into the thin cold air.
(Schongauer, through Michelangelo, and both
so removed from my particular conceits. Could
they have even imagined a creature like me?)

5.
My father, driving me to ceramics class when I was
eight, listening to the radio, forgetting for a moment
I was there. He sang along to “The First Time Ever
I Saw Your Face,” transported by some longing that
embarrassed me to hear it; that longing’s mine, now.

Elegy (A cadralor)

Osiris and Maat, Louvre Museum, photograph by Rama

1.
A thready pulse; the silken blue line
beneath the skin of your wrist telling
us your heart is unravelling. How is it
that we can’t thread this needle? The
vein on the back of your hand shuts
its eyes every time we try. The gown,
unholy, scant cover for the ceremony.

2.
Tuning the guitar to open G, getting it just
so. I hear your ghost shimmering through
overtones rising off the soundboard, dust
rising off the neck; I saw how it broke your
heart to no longer have the strength to try.
Did you know I did it for your smile, all my
practice and play? Gone now, the crown of
callus on my fingertips, it’s been that long.

3.
A coffee cup, full of DnD dice. Also in the cup: two
pair of scissors; two hand-blown perfume bottles no
bigger than my thumb, one broken. O undrinkable
memory, to find me so parched my lips can’t mouth
a blessing, afraid as I am to try my luck, to cut the
blossom from its branch, fill what’s fragile with joy.

4.
Your practice, those occult beliefs, kept you scrying
the flame of your life, writing and reading sigils as
if a surety, a bond for meaning. Yet when it all went
south, dear, you had me and my love, enough to trim
your nails, check for open sores on your feet; even
unstrung, you sang to me, instar to eclose to instar.

5.
The direct path isn’t for me. It’s the detour, the bend
in the road I long for, but now I need to bring back a
tale beyond my horizon. I find a ball of red string that’s
infinitely long, tie an end to the First Tree and set off.
How else could I find my way back, past the bend in
an aorta, a thready pulse, the scars upon our hearts?

.
.
.

To learn more about the new poetic form, the cadralor, see Gleam.

Ink (A cadralor, for Caitlin G.)

Wellcome Collection, "A crow is standing
on the handle of a large pitcher in front of
a well; illustration of a fable by J. Ogilby"

1.
Bottled shadows, the inverse of
the droplets of liquid mercury I’d
play with when I was a child: wet,
welling up like tears as my crow-
quill pierced the surface tension.

2.
Incomplete instructions for making
a silverpoint drawing. Rabbit-skin
glue needs a little grit, it’s the tooth
that bites off the silver. An invisible
ink, no truth shown until the tarnish.

3.
The well’s broken, we don’t know why. Sent
a camera to snake down the hole, pass its
signal up, ghostly as a sonogram: a hex nut
has stripped off, jammed the pump. We call
a machinist. His nails, black as new moons.

4.
On the floor and flat on my belly, propped up on my
elbows, watching Ko-Ko climb out of the inkwell. The
old TV screen shiny as my five-year-old’s delight in
those adventures I’d have, if I didn’t have to go home;
years later, the sad nostalgia of Ko-Ko on tattoo flash.

5.
Another home: I learned when
northern cardinals flashed red
through live-oak, you’d make a
wish. Here, it’s ink-black crows
who make a wish, on seeing me.

Flicker (A cadralor)

Greg Schechter, "Northern Flicker, Red-Shafted," 2010

1.
The call—squeezing plosives through
shafted light—repeats. I tilt my head
to fix the source, perhaps to see the
bird, but there’s no bird, just the call.
Is this a song with no singer? What is
it, that cleaves the air and my heart?

2.
Taking my loneliness out for a walk, I stopped by a
movie theater, a seedy old revival house, where the
matinee was a double feature: “Popeye” and “Shaft.”
The line went around the block. I paid my five dollars,
sat among fierce joy-filled children hollering for their
heroes as the baddies were beat down. The cheering
in the flickering light, when we still believed in justice.

3.
The limb that split off the apple tree the week
after we bought the cottage. Where it cracked
wasn’t a clean wound. Now half-healed, half-
rotten; worse, a water sprout thick as another
trunk’s behind the break, an imbalancing act
near a row of Os augured by downies. Flecked
shadows; perforations tell the wind, “Tear here.”

4.
I walked and walked, far from where I lived.
It was twilight in that city, I was night-blind
at the bottom of those steep sooty canyons.
The deserts I’d known weren’t as arid as my
hope for joy, there. Waiting for rain, for tears.

5.
The first bird I knew, here, was a surprise out
on my brother’s balcony. An awkward landing
seen out of the corner of my eye as we were
talking. Spots! And gray, and a flash of color
when it wheeled over the railing, falling into the
sky. Red-shafted, my brother said; I thought it
a miracle, to be so beautiful and so common.

Bookmarked (A cadralor)

Chris English, "Auburn, CA: Hummingbird in
Lewis Mock Orange Shrub, May 2009"

1.
I ripped them out, root and stem, the mock
oranges that never bloomed. Tapping on
their canes, a hollow sound like a chime
made of bones. Too close to the foundation
of the cottage for the light to reach them, too
close to a time when I didn’t know their name.

2.
Every breath shared, as I open a window to
the day, though there’s woodsmoke on the air.
The snake plant says it will pierce the air for me,
and it does. The clearing fog, lifting; light falling,
playing mumblety-peg with the dagger of a leaf.

3.
Who gave me the gray-green jasper I dug out of
the flower-bed? Whose mouth did I kiss to tongue
the stone, taste the clay? Who was it, pica-kissing
the dirt under my nails, sucking my fingers clean?
I dreamt I’d mislaid myself, woke in a muddy bed.

4.
Some old wives’ tale retold to its roots, when the bone
meal for planting roses began as blood sacrifice—as I
remake garden beds, digging through worms and clay,
I find a coccyx under an old white rose, shank bones
under a sword fern; porous, rusted from the iron seep.

5.
At your touch, memories stir and rise, dust motes from
places in me I’d long forgotten—the sweetness of maple
sugar on my lips, the vanillin lignin smell of pages from
a long-awaited book I opened, as you open me; oh place
your mark, love, hold where we stop for now to start again
later; let’s not forget how our bones will feed the flowers.

.

.

.

To learn more about the new poetic form, the cadralor, see Gleam.

Tishrei

The stories spin, warp and weft through
holes in a tablet, in my memory, others’
fingers spelling ram’s-horn patterns, the
horn a reminder of the communal breath
we no longer share. Tell me a story about
a weaver, I asked the wind. “Only that a
spider dropped its thread, too heavy with
ash to sieve for flies.” This fire season, I
see hummingbirds rising like sparks, their
nests dusted with soot from those webs.

Sough

Lead Mines, Clough, Rivington UK,
Gary Gray, Date Unknown

The excavation’s long since stalled
out. Digging the sough, I mean. “To
mine the lead, we need to draw the
water table down, to draw the water
down we need to dig, but the picks
were left behind, were lost, and so
am I.” There’s a shallow ditch, or the
shape left behind where you fell. Oh.
Oh. This geology, these mines, clay
under my fingernails that smells like
the last kiss I gave you—atop your
head as you dozed at the computer,
blue-gray light from the screen like
a caul, wrapping us both. But I left
the room to go to bed, and you, my
dear, fell, then crawled, then left,
and still I can’t drain this sough.

Plumb line

By Gurdeepdali - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

It points towards the center of gravity of the earth,
which is grief, or iron. Not lead, despite the weight
I feel at the center of my chest telling me otherwise.
I don’t think a person can build something true and
square without a plumb-line, though—even when
the pointing towards the gravity of grief, the burrows
where its small cousins live (little creatures without
names, blind and scrabbling for grubs in their dark
dens) leaves me raddled and hollowed out. A weak
field spun up by my fingertips to sing for you, for us,
along the wire—loss trued up, pulled towards the iron
heart of things, spin and stasis, magnetic at the core.

Respite

The apples that have traveled further
in two weeks than I have in two months
tell me stories: how the pollen-dusted
bees tumbled in their flowers, how the
growers counted out their pennies to
pay for the right to grow them—apples
piled into great wooden boxes where
they slept, strapped to a truck bed, snug
over macadam, dreaming of earthworms
fat and red as bud-break on the currant.

Decameron 2020: From a post to a private Facebook Group 3/22/2020

Timothy Knepp, "Redear Sunfish," 2008

It once was true, and true it shall ever be.
The cattails, taller than I was, obstructing my view.
The rusty old rowboat, with its creaky oarlocks.
My grandma, gently pulling the oars as we made our way through the reeds and cattails, fishing.

It was summer (it had to have been summer, I was maybe seven, maybe eight, so I was in school if not for summer), and we’d go up to Rockland Lake, and my parents would visit with cousins and aunts and family friends, and I’d go with my grandma on adventures.

She showed me how to put a worm on the hook.
Oh, how it struggled, the poor slimy red thing, roiling between my fingers.
I couldn’t do it, so she did it for me.

She’d bait her hook too, and we sat in the rowboat near the lily pads and cattails, watching the red-and-white plastic floats bob a little on the riffle.

Until the float popped under!
“Pull back a little - gently!”
I tried to set the hook, and it didn’t seem to set, and when I reeled in there was half a worm left on the hook, and no fish.

She helped me put a new worm on, and cast off again.
We sat, together, on the water, in the green-and-rust smelling boat, in the warm sunlight.
She smelled faintly of perfume and laundry and cotton cloth.
I was her cub, she was my lioness, showing me how to hunt, keeping me safe while I learned.

Her float ducked under!
She set the hook and, like magic, like something from a fairy-tale, she reeled in a small iridescent rainbow, pan-shaped, a sunfish. It was a keeper.
And then my float popped under, and she helped me tug back to gently set the hook, and we reeled it in together, and it was a perch, a yellow perch. It, too, was a keeper.

She caught one more panfish, and I helped her row us back to the dock.
Later, at the bungalow, she skinned and gutted the little fish as I watched in raw fascination and horror, deboned them, minced the meat.

That night, we all ate home-made gefilte fish.
The golden light of the day passed into night, and me and my brothers and little cousins were tucked into our cots, and I fell asleep.

Safe, and fed, and full of the day.
It once was true, and true it shall ever be.

Blessed memory

Daucus Carota, photographer unknown, 2006

If it wasn’t for that neural trick
no stories could make their way
from lips to ear, or from then to
now. I couldn’t conjure myself
at six, at ten, my heart open to
the queen anne’s lace and its
amethyst heart at the center of
the umbrel; couldn’t recall the
fear, the bloody wet ruby of my
skinned knee. Limping home,
crying for my dad to help me
after I fell off my bike. He was
there, gathered me up, cleaned
and dressed the wound, wiped
my tears. And now he’s neither
there nor here, he’s dust, and
the child I was tells me a story
I need to hear (of course he fell
short, of course, but it’s also so
simple and good—just a child,
bleeding stopped, tears dried).
Z"L, what’s written as we murmur
their names, our beloved dead.

Shadow

Louis Daguerre, Plaster casts, Société française
de photographie, 1837

Ahead, approaching, some stranger comes
walking, loose-limbed and arms swinging wide—
that silhouette, shadow-play brushing a scuffle,
a soft shoe, a memory. Familiar, unfamiliar, the
stride—they grow taller, elongate, and I catch
myself, my self. It’s me, it’s my shadow blocking
the light, as liquid and dark as ink from the well.
My harbinger twin, spilling stories I can’t yet tell.

Bee

Reese Derrenberger, "Fig," 2008

The memory of sweetness, hollowed
out. It stopped me, as I bent to pry up
milk-sapped spurge from a fissure in
the drive (for what? it won’t save the
spalled concrete)—a ruin of what was
once a honey bee, its head excavated,
sightless, resting near a broken thorax,
an empty abdomen. When I went to
look again after weeding, it was gone.
I felt as if I’d misplaced a letter sent by
an old friend, then misplaced not just
the letter, but the empty envelope, the
blue-and-white Chinese porcelain dish
where I’d set it, that I’d even misplaced
the memory of paper sacks full of sweet
honey figs still warm from his garden.

Suspended

Angelina Earley, "Vertigo," 2009

As I lay these words down I wish each
were a wooden slat bound up by strong
rope—maybe made from twisted vines,
or yucca fiber rolled into cord across our
thighs, across all the days it takes to make
a line long enough to find you. Each word
pierced for the rope, tied up and tossed
through the air, I’d watch them extend as
if they were my own hands arms spine ribs
stretching out to you, towards a place so
wholly unknown. Listening to where they
catch, to where we each tie up, both of us
at the end of every arc of our single stories
now suspended and made new, as we both
place our trust that these words will hold
us safely until we can hold one another.

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.