STINA GROTH
We were picnicking on the plains
when she emerged from the rushes.
She wore an apricot smock.
Her face was smeared with soot.
She said her name was Stina Groth.
A cloud of bats burst from the chimney
of a crumbling cottage behind her.
We asked her where home was.
She drew a circle in the silt with a twig.
How long did she stay with us?
How did she keep her tin lantern lit?
She showed us where the snakes were
hiding in the canal-side rocks.
She wouldn’t let mother comb the knots
out of her hair. She knew mother
was pregnant before mother did.
When mother was bleeding,
Stina mixed a viscous gruel for her.
Mother grimaced after drinking it.
The next day she looked refreshed.
Stina marked the moon phases
on the hickory handle of father’s axe.
One Sunday, she taught us a game:
we wound a chain we found
in the stable around our bodies.
She called it Springmaking.
When it was her turn, she lay still
in her cylinder of steel for minutes.
Was she breathing?
We called her name three times
before we heard, through the links,
her whisper that the next day
she had to go back behind the lake.
My head began to ache.
She was gone before we woke.
Months later, I saw someone
selling stag skins at a market
outside Kvikkjokk. Her head
was bowed as she tended
the smoking lantern in her lap.
I approached the stall and called
Stina’s name. Then stopped.
The face that looked up
was wrinkled with age.
DISFIGUREMENTS
1.
She watches me
while holding an armful of tendrils
still locked to their swinging earth-knots.
She is a tube through which night pours.
I let her lead me
through the tomato vines,
past those planets of juice.
A whip-poor-will shifts on its branch.
Something is trying to be born.
2.
I hold forth to friends
concerning my theory of colors.
In truth, I can grasp no railing of certainty.
They know this and nod,
nudging each other beneath the table.
3.
With her again,
pursued near a cathedral, watched by gargoyles.
We rest, knowing rest is impossible.
Everything is impossible.
Thunder is the source, I think,
and look to her for confirmation.
She looks to me for confirmation.
4.
In the rumbling cab of a semi.
Sun-scorched leather burns my bare thighs.
No sun.
The driver assures me I have come
to the surface and I should believe him.
I do.
This soothes us.
He is tan and naked.
We drive through smokestack shadows.
Turtle claws dangle from the mirror.
I lay my head on his chest.
He says, “That’s right.”
I look down:
his legs extend through the floor
where the pedals should be.
5.
I’m disappearing
and need to be seen by her.
Drink saddens us.
The sofa smells of crushed hope.
She recounts a dream
(I think: but I’m dreaming)
in which a man with a knife
crouches behind her parked car.
Out the window up the street,
I see a man watching us.
6.
A phone call.
I answer and hear whispering.
I rush to his hospital room
with a view of downtown Cleveland.
Glittering sleeve of lake behind towers.
He says his sister is wandering the wards
looking for him.
When she finds him, she’ll kill him.
He asks me to sketch a snapdragon cluster.
I do.
This soothes us.
Sound of hooves on tile in the hallway.
He writes something on a piece of paper,
hands it to me.
“They’ve slipped in,” it reads.
He indicates a small scar
on the flesh between thumb and finger.
EASTERN HALF-FREE MOREL
We have of the universe
only inchoate visions,
random associations, which
create hostile illusions
for the conceited observer
who ought to be trained,
not for visual acuity, but for
pattern recognition or even
an aural sensitivity to this
hologrammatic acoustigram
of the land, its conical cap
honeycombed with sonorous
pits and ridges, emitting a not-
obnoxious scent, evoking
dusk and mossy caves.
So it is
that in the illustrations
of certain Books of Hours
one can be led to discern
amid the medieval crowd
the soaring steeple of Bourges.
So it was
that, downlooking for
this choice form beneath
a frosty April moon,
we performed Gaussian boson sampling by sending fifty indistinguishable single-mode squeezed states into a one-hundred-mode, ultralow-loss interferometer with full connectivity and random matrix—phase-locking the whole setup—and sampling the output using one hundred high-efficiency single-photon detectors
and detected nothing
but sweetgum balls
masquerading as our quarry.
After this ripple
of excitement,
we gave up,
deluded, hollow,
demorelized.
EROS
One August day, I strolled
the forest’s fringe. Sunflowers
tottered in meadows bordered
by crape myrtle bursting
in fuchsia blooms. Larks trilled.
An arrow shot from the woods
and pierced my chest.
Blood stained my white shirt.
The shaft emerging from my sternum
was long and made of hemlock,
fletched with vulture feathers.
Two mating dragonflies lighted on it.
Then flew off. Pulling it out
seemed as hard as pulling off
my left arm with my right. I touched it:
the world broke into waves of pain.
Something in me screamed. I ran into
the forest, toward the arrow’s origin.
My hands brushed aside rioting flora.
Hours passed. The forest darkened.
I leaped a gurgling stream, plunged
through swamp vapor, the jostled
arrow loosening agony from my flesh.
I stopped in a clearing. It was night.
I stood panting in a circle of light.
In the gloom, I saw a filthy thing,
hunched and fat. Its ruby lips
twisted in a snarl, and its bald head
had no eyes. Its feet hung inches
above the ground. Its bow
was the length of its body. At its back:
a blur of wings. It flew away.
I turned my head: the shaft extended
from my back. For miles. The tip
was lodged in the mast of a galleon
tilting in a storm-churned sea.