Purveyors of fine poetry since 2003.
I spear
a melon ball with a blue
toothpick When I lay it down
on a napkin, it leaves
a mark
like a watercolor cloud
What this means
is the shapes
of any number of things
are hidden
inside each other
They leach out
at every opportunity
Who
wouldn't want to become
something other than
their
merely recognizable selves
At the imaging center, her husband checks in
along with other patients there for MRI or
tomography scans. After they get tracer
dye injected in their veins, they'll lie
on a table fed into a gantry as x-rays rotate
around their bodies, producing cross-sectioned
image slices— organs, bones, muscles, blood
vessels— that can be layered to help
doctors with diagnoses or treatment.
She's in the waiting room, where the large TV
monitor is always tuned to a channel where two men
go into falling-down houses. They rip apart rotting
floorboards and waterstained walls like they
were made of wet cardboard, toss out old bathroom
fixtures and hardware. They stop frequently to banter,
as the closed captions show. Later, a female realtor
will check on their progress; her clients are so
excited for open house. "Before" and "After" time
lapse pictures flash on the screen. When her husband
comes out of his procedure, the show is ready for
the big reveal. It looks as though complete renovation
took only a week— A family oohs and aahs over a marble-
veneered kitchen island; bold paint colors, massive
flower vases elevating furniture on a budget.
Procyon lotor
The guys from Acme examine
the holes some animal harrowed
in the ground and say, No, not vole
or mole but raccoon— recorded
on John Smith's list of Powhatan words
as aroughcun, meaning the one who rubs
or scratches with its hands. Or variously,
like a rat or a dog that washes its hands.
And so the eponym, after the brightest star
in Canis Minor. A mask, a troop, a gaze of them
seem to have found our backyard hospitable to
their nocturnal rooting and excretion. Perhaps
they find the fig tree tempting, even if
the fruit is still mostly green. The animal
control guys set a trap by the fence, laying out
a short trail of marshmallows. They'll come out
every day over the next two weeks to check and
replace traps as needed. Of course it is the lure,
the old ferment of sugar. We wonder when we'll hear,
in the dark, the clang that precedes the moaning.
It is their nature to stay
hidden for as long as they can.
It is the one burning gaze
out of a face, in a row of girls
dressed as men to partner another
row of girls dressed as themselves—
my mother's among them, the image
of pulchritude in a flounced skirt
and beaded top. I've seen this
picture only once or twice. But I
know very little about the one with
the burning gaze—only that she rode
a bus from the town they were from
in the north, almost every week,
even after my mother had married.
After she was married, I don't think
my father knew all her secrets either.
Both my parents died later in life
of natural causes—lingering illness
combined with age. I tried searching
online for records of that other death,
in our home, one night in '64 or '65;
there are none. But medical information
confirms that mixing a rodenticide
with coffee will not neutralize
the poison. It will still be toxic.
My vascular network
would circle the earth's
midline at least four times—
sprawling ravelry of red, marking
highways that explorers in the past
had to decipher by rumor and star-
chart. Their destination: islands
warmed with clouds of clove and
anise, forests where vines
of pink and green peppercorn
still hold their secrets close
in each cluster. Long
centuries after, have I been
found, or have the many traces
of my going made new maps
for all my future sojourning?
Hodegetria (Ὁδηγήτρια, Gr.) —
"She who shows the way"
Our names will be carved on the base
of the grave marker in the family plot—
right now, for those of us still around,
birth year followed by a hyphen, then
a clean space (to be filled in when
it's time). The year I was born, these
251 acres were consecrated as burial
ground. The name is taken from Jasna
Góra, a church in Poland where a black
Madonna and Child painted on linden panels
preside over the altar. Two gashes
stripe her right cheek. There are more
on her neck: wounds sustained from an
attempted theft in the 1400s. Mere
strokes, wing-like smudges. But I believe
moths are always a visitation from our
ancestors; and once, as I sat vigil
by my father's casket, a hummingbird
brushed the glass briefly then was gone—
an apparition. I am surprised that I
don't think this writes an earlier order
for our deaths, though our names will,
one day, truly mark the spaces where
we'll be laid to rest on that bright hill.
Pleasure boats circumnavigate a man-made
lake. At the edge of the frame, assorted
scenes of ordinary life: ice candy vendor,
mother pushing a sleeping child in a stroller.
Flies circle a sticky puddle of melted sugar.
Willow branches bend low enough to touch. You
know the smell of rain and the flicker of heat
that occasionally precedes thunder.
In the open, in plain
sight, can be the best
place to hide.
Cows in blue harnesses attached to helicopters rotate in midair.
They are being airlifted out of the valley because a glacier
has just collapsed on an entire village in the Alps.
There is logic to this, but what is the first point in
the syllogism? the last?
I wish I could say How funny or How strange or even Words
fail me.
In the yard, runways of mud. Evidence of tunneling. I suppose
it makes sense to try to live underground.
Rilke wrote: If we had to exist to become the one we love,
what would the heart have to create?
The idea gives me goose bumps— that everything
I love, including myself, I would have to also somehow
bring to life in the world.
When we invited the parish priest to bless our house,
he put a flask of holy water into the child's hand.
Go ahead, he said. It's you who will be living
in this space.
How's it going, I ask a friend. He replies,
Extremely well. We banter about his use
of the adverb— if that were true, what
could tomorrow's adverb possibly be? It gets
a bit philosophical after that. How true is it
that if one were truly happy, one would be
completely bored, or boring? Nirvana isn't
actually when you achieve a state of pure bliss
but rather when the twin torches of desire
and suffering are doused, and nothing disturbs
them back to life. So what does it mean that two
worms buried more than thirty thousand years in
permafrost have wakened? The first thing they did
after thawing was wriggle around, eat, and reproduce.
I don't blame them— that long a fast would make me
ravenous too. Goats, sheep, and deer have four stomachs.
Beaked whales can have up to thirteen. Nematodes, though,
are practically all stomach— They're all one alimentary
tract: mouth, esophagus, stoma, intestine, rectum, anus.
They're not more nor less developed than we are. Imagine
though what it would be like to live in a world where
no one needs to go hungry, where food lines are
an aberration— What would it take to live so close
to the earth and understand how grace is the condition
in which, together, we can live extremely well?
—Nourishing and being nourished, every mouthful
connecting us to the impulse to live for the pleasure of
the comeback, the vision of undifferentiated bodies.
On a weekly radio show about words,
a caller asks about the use of amount
of versus number of. She is annoyed
when she hears people say things like
There was a large amount of people
at the protest rally yesterday, or What
is the amount of books that have been
banned under this administration? The show's
hosts agree: countable nouns should be
used for things or people to which we can apply
some discrete unit of measurement;
and uncountable nouns for quantities
that can only be measured as a whole,
like water, or sunlight, or time. But they also
remind the caller of how language
is always evolving— now we use words
that used to mean entirely different
things: a spinster used to refer to someone
who spun thread; in "Henry V," there's
a line that goes I love the lovely bully — apparently,
it used to mean sweetheart or darling, not
someone who intimidates or harasses through
aggression. There and their, its and it's,
your and you're— same, or different? Mantel, the lintel
or decorative shelf above a fireplace, where you
could put little framed pictures. Mantle, a cloak or
shawl; or that part of the earth between
the surface and its superheated core— where scientists
have recently discovered two large, continent-
sized structures. Made of oceanic crust and
other unknown elements, they've quietly
thickened under our feet through millennia; and we
don't know yet how exactly, someday, they'll
turn inside out everything else we know of this planet.