The first thimble was the tanned hide
of an enemy’s thumb. Whisky
had yet to be invented, but
needles were employed as lances
in desperate finger-to-finger combat.
Battlefields were so numerous,
they were stacked into other battlefields
like Russian dolls. Soon, brass
was pressed into use, & one armorer
began dimpling the surface
to ward off smallpox.
Prostitutes made their Johns (then
still called Jacks) wear thimbles
on every finger, because who knew
where those hands had been?
Meanwhile they were measuring ale
with the horns of bulls. Guts
were spilling from unprotected abdomens.
If you didn’t want a sorceror’s tongue,
you couldn’t stare open-mouthed
at the pock-marked moon.
Hyperphagia
There’s a votive candle with a picture of Santa Barbara
in her teal colored robe flickering in the middle
of our table, and a faded prayer in Spanish on the other
side of the glass. There are swirls of gold and orange
on the chalkboard over the bar, wreathing the names
of the evening’s offer of cervezas: Dos Equis, Modelo,
Corona, Tecate. Between bursts of music, the clatter
of silverware, the steady hum and static of voices.
We lick the last of the guacamole off the appetizer
plate, but we barely make a dent in the pastel
and sweet corn tamales. Is the waitress disappointed?
She brings three plastic take-out boxes and sweeps up the tab.
It’s the middle of the week and almost October; the dark
comes earlier. Somewhere a train is always pulling away.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Computer Chip
This is our tilled ground, our garden of forking paths. I picture its millions of transistors blinking, its mono-crystal silicon wafers pulsing as information courses like sap through the photolithographic veins, parsed by logic gates, blended by multiplexers. I know this isn’t quite what happens, but I keep trying to imagine it: how roots link up with roots & what leaps between them. How layers thinner than paper overlap like pages in a book that writes & re-writes itself, or like the sedimentary crust of a living planet. I know it’s not alive, that it is closer to a map than a landscape, & that in trying to re-purpose old templates I fall far short. But something about its stark dualism — the closed 1, the open 0 — & all it can gather in fills me with awe. The integrated circuit is my shepherd. I shall not want.
Pledge
My dear, she texted late last night, if you can spare me something, I need it for food, for medicine, for things in the everyday. How could I not respond? You cannot say, But I just sent you something less than two weeks ago. Mother, sometimes I feel the days slip like water through my fingers. And then the cycle of worry rotates— paddle wheel, boat going nowhere, ferry stuck between the shores of departure and arrival, while sun-worshippers zip by in motorized rubber boats. Putting away books on the shelf, I came across a friend’s inscription in a journal, given years ago. She wrote, Looking forward to our forties, when we will have made it; to our fifties, when we’re settled, and to our sixties, when we will look back at our lives to celebrate the harvest. I set it back and ponder this assurance: something I have never really had in such pure and unadulterated form. I am the queen of making-do, I’d joked back. I’ve saved all manner of odds and ends for use on a rainy day. Wrapping paper, shampoo samples, gift bottles of wine. But there is no contentment in these miserly economies, mother. I bite into bread, or fruit, or cheese, and some part of me shrivels with the shame of being unable to share these morsels with you.
In response to cold mountain (60).
Baby Carrots
As if carrots were yeast cells,
reproducing through budding:
the baby an adorably rounded
chip off the old block.
This triumph of marketing
has in fact reversed a trend
toward shorter carrots, because
of course the long ones can yield
as many as four “babies” each.
But are they infantile enough
to compete with junk food?
One ad psychologist recommends
dusting them with powder —
not Johnson & Johnson but
something orange, like Cheetos.
Carrot breeders lament
that selecting for succulence
makes them brittle as glass.
They can crunch in the mouth
but they mustn’t shatter —
they’re not bombs.
And a faint trace of bitterness
must remain, or the consumer
no longer perceives them
as true carrots. Authenticity is key,
along with air-tight packaging.
I struggle to open a bag, & find
I’m all thumbs.
Sources: “Digging the baby carrot” and “Baby carrots take on junk food with hip marketing campaign.”
Triptych
If I were a leaf, a thorn, a sapling bent by wind— And you do but don’t believe, when I tell you how at seventeen, I stood up in the darkened cinema (one of two in my hometown); the usher in the shabby cardigan shone his flashlight up and down the aisles, calling my name because my father had phoned the manager to ask that I be ordered home.
*
If I were a knot, a burr on the surface of wood— You would not say so often, Weep then bear up; crumple then cease, endure, transmute. Transmute, as the heart of darkest wood yields coils that might still shine, after the axe— Onyx or anthracite, or something more domestic: yes, sorghum dripping from a spoon.
*
If I were fairer or less coarse, less complicated than a modular plot— But I am always the immigrant, wed to a handful of exit visas. Spring is a relief after the two-plot designs of rain and summer, rain and heat. Of the parched heart, a poet once wrote: come upon me with a shower of mercy. Sometimes I think spring is kinder by far than love.
*
In response to cold mountain (59).
Echo
Yes, I still remember how the old market was laid out:
fruit, rice and dried fish, the row of coffee vendors,
the vegetable sellers; and beyond, the butchers
and the fishmongers. At the end of narrow corridors
slick with scales and fish guts, the women who packed
salt expertly into paper cones— such tiny fossils
of minerals and tears. And the boys that pulled
wobbly wooden carts filled with mountain produce
called out warnings up and down the hilly streets.
Most everyone I used to know has gone ahead—
gone on to gold, to gated subdivisions, early
retirement, presumably to everything they ever
wanted. And under this half-biscuit of a moon,
I stand, head tilted, still listening for the slow
stutter of crickets calling from the garden.
In response to Via Negativa: Fall.
The season turns again
The season turns again, mother. The names of months end
in chilled syllables. For thin-veined plants, it is almost time
to go under, into the ground where the bulbs will winter.
The red-tailed hawk takes wing, mother. But it’s been weeks
since we last saw the yellow-crowned night herons. Perhaps
they’ve begun their pilgrimage to a coast that’s warmer.
There’s a clump of mint that remains in the pot, mother.
And the stand of rosemary is hardy, and will hold its ground.
But the bee balm is fringed lace, and the lavender thins—
In time, all that remains is their feathery scent.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Sampler
Running Stitch
The hand that spins the yarn has also sanded the frame, has lit the fire and boiled the morning coffee, has brought the trash to the curb for pick-up, has started the ignition of the car that sits in rusted place in the old garage.
*
Herringbone
Noon is the hour of making do: smack in the middle of need and want, those two tips that touch and break, touch and break, mimicking the hinge in the collarbone.
*
Backstitch
The earliest words learned in a new language: body parts, swear words, words with which to make a promise, words to oil a stone. Which ones cannot be taken back?
*
Chain
You know when someone will change your life: that split second when an edge makes itself more sharply apparent. For instance, an upturned collar in the crowd. Then, stepping into the sunlight’s bronze hoops, blinded by something you cannot quite decide— whether akin to remorse, or pleasure.
In response to Via Negativa: Topocentric.
Topocentric
Nobody has time for work anymore, we just commute — four hours each way in our air-conditioned sex machines. Real objects have been given painted shadows so we remember what we’re here for: to know our place. The ayatollahs of sacred architecture instruct us to watch our feet as we walk & keep count of all our steps in a spiral-bound notebook. The forests may have gone away, but we can still plant flags in the cracked & peeling earth. I stop to admire a crowd of feathered dinosaurs bobbing their heads, closing in on that lady with the walker who’s scattering crumbs.