In Situ

Sometimes the language tenders its own
resonant edge, as when one reads

of how the remains remain submerged, as in
in-place drownings of forests.

I first read of their somber strains in
a letter speaking of being consumed,

in French la noyade, the name of a scent
mixed from blood cedarwood,

maritime pine, cypress, onycha tincture,
seaweed, a song sunk enough to

call it sodden. There is nothing heavier
than an unnamed waterlog that longs

to be sounded if not instinctively spelled.
I should say must, instinctively, note

Hello, piggies, who snore, root, farrow
and brave. Welcome piggies, though, more
accurately: welcome to me. I welcome
myself into your midst. I’ve arrived here
after a long journey from that plane only
marginally lower than this one, but
from which it’s nearly impossible to ascend.

Piggies, as recently as two clicks ago, you would’ve
found me down there, pouring molten gold into small
mammalian skulls tidily excavated from owl pellets
and spring floods. Mole, vole, shrew, more. Cauldron,
ladle, funnel, fill. Cool. The cracks and hollows, sockets
and circuits, now gaping, now all silent gold.

Alice was actually a labeler and not a pickler. Still, she knew what Mr. H’s picklers did was nothing like her grandmother’s pickling, sweaty and stained and clouded by hot vinegar steam, shoveling already rotting vegetables into their boiling bath like some kind of unbelieving prayer. Everyone winced when eating what came out of her grandmother’s pickle jars. Mr. H’s were made of faceted clear glass, and the bobbing pickles inside were a bright, inviting candy-green. To look at one was to feel it snip crisply between your teeth, to set your mouth watering. Alice was midwife to that salivary burst. That was what she dressed up for. Today it mattered even more than usual.

She named the dog after a Hollywood actor, someone she had shared a scene with once. She had only one line in the film. She looks straight at the camera with her famous dark eyes—someone once called them wounds—and asks or says, A beautiful view?  This was supposed to hint at one of her current scandals. Once, on one of those rare nights when she asked me to sit with her after dinner, her face red with port, which she drank out of those miniature crystal glasses you have to hold with your fingertips, she said, That’s your father’s name. Of course, the years don’t add up, but then my mother was never interested in the truth, or rather, her truth was fluid, changing with circumstance or whim. But she didn’t lie, she believed whatever she said completely. This, more than anything else, was why men fell in love with her.

The Inside of a Wolf

I gut the wolf. All I find is a hole/and I follow/the hole farther in and farther/into earth shaped like a great sigh./The earth, open and airy/as sky. The earth is blue/as thought inside, farther/and further, the wandering/into earth, until a great opening opens/up beneath the hole/and suddenly nothing has a body. Nothing/has a body but me. Into the belly/of the wolf I fall, farther/and forward into emptiness. Inside/the earth is blue. Blue/is the absence of all/earth, all body, and I tumble into blue/so shattering, so empty/all body comes/back, a kind of courage, holding on to one’s body, so/tight, while tumbling/and turning/into a sigh. Holding on/to one’s body so tight/all breath is lost. Falling/into the earth, so careless/with its emptiness, so daring,/hiding inside a wolf, the moon’s mouth.

Olga’s coworker, known privately as her Work Wife, had said the wrong thing about Olga’s new haircut. “It doesn’t look like the photo you showed me,” she’d said. This is what the Work Wife fixated on, rather than the glory of the haircut before her. The Work Wife said something else about the staff potluck later that day, but Olga could barely hear her. She cut the conversation short and walked back to her cubicle. Olga could feel the Work Wife rolling her eyes. It was ruined between them now, at least for the day.
The Work Wife had said other things to her over the years.
During a discussion of celebrity lookalikes: “You have a striking resemblance to Anne Frank.”
After Olga had accidentally, horribly, dug a deep, slow-to-heal hole in her cheek while popping a pimple and tried to hide it with makeup: “What happened to your face? Asking as a friend.”
And yet, how Olga loved her, the Work Wife.
And yet, how she hated her, the Work Wife.

Amid the storm, a phantom

formerly Coronado remarks:

“I was the beating heart inside

that insidious breastplate.”

Between bursts of hailstones

his companion confesses,

“I was the low-level prelate

sent to raise a clay church and

ring the altar with paintings

of the most fantastic torments.”

The rain’s fierce silver slashes

red hills above a spatter of cactus.

A fringe of lightning, unfurling

from a black cloud, tears apart

some first and final place.

Old ghosts fade out, become

songbirds at the cusp of

the mating season.

When you were the size of a fist, a coyote dragged a three-year-old Angeleno out of the living room by the Peter Pan collar of her pale yellow shirt. She survived but was left with a sizable scar on her cheek. The scar resembled an American flag, pocks for stars and gouges for stripes. Her mother was on the news all the time, which led to the child signing a deal with an agency, and quite soon after that, the child and her scar started appearing on billboards as the new face of a California restaurant chain that sold bratwursts. Last month, for reasons unrelated, the little girl passed away.
The querent used to say we come back as either human or animal, that in the spirit world, there is no delineation.
It’s nice to think the end isn’t the end.
Though I wouldn’t dare say that to the dead girl’s mother.

What we had done was trample on Johnson’s city, four sheets of paper, loosely placed side by side, with buildings growing in no particular visual perspective, some upwards, some in profile, some in three dimensions but others in blueprint, and this, we felt intuitively, was a triumph of Johnson’s city, or would-be city, it’s resistance to confinement, its ability to transcend.

And we sat with Johnson. We consoled. We patted Johnson on the back and said that we might rebuild it, that it could be rebuilt. That it could be better and that we could help.

We collected the roll of white butcher paper from its mount and unfurled it across the linoleum, gathered the colored pencils, the crayons and scented markers and watercolors and even the Sharpies we’d hidden in our cubbies. We collected scissors and Scotch tape, and began to connect the sheets of paper, for there would be no limit to what we could design.

Nocturne

Midnight at the pit of my irrelevance:
a hair’s breadth away, I step closer to the mouth of it, no more afraid to
shake hands with my lacuna than a bird is of the air
whistling in its bones. To stay possible as long as possible

had felt like enough now—a persistence of streaks
in soft butter yellow shed from the clock tower onto the indigo-
freaked slate-to-black vagueness
that indicates the river. The light lives

The island appeared in the playa –
a thick family of vegetation in sand
as if risen from the undulation of blued snow over
grasses, purple. Huddling
through time, as bodies green and dark
in me knew better, yet compelled me
to run from the tall thick house
where I lay resting
and take refuge from the wind
where wind blew.

The feet trudge the path of the eyes.

Vouch for snow-covered trails skirted by galvanic tamaracks,
the previous fall’s needles a carpet of #2 pins.

Vouch for garrulous waxwings captivating powerlines,
mesmerizing middle C and rising,
coloratura clouds.

Vouch for the rich acoustic world of moths
fallen silent, streets of pupal stillness,
bodies suspended in glycerol sleep.

I. THE SYMMETRY

In the beginning, they told us that only babies born with a herringbone of downy fuzz running the full length of their spines carried the gene. Then it was the nostrils: if one was larger than the other. From there, it grew into a hysteria of symmetry. If one eye was squintier the baby was a carrier. One ear higher. One testicle smaller. Left side of the labia fatter. Oh, how Richard squirmed at this. To think of his daughter having labia; such a prickly word for his pure baby girl whom we’d designed one night on a whiz of bubbly wine and goat cheese, right down to her delicate parts. That area I engineered, being the woman and inherently more attuned to shades of pink, shapes of flower petals, and all. But, still, nothing was guaranteed.

Still Life With Flying Sombreros

Three sombreros hung on pegs in a cantina, where their owners stood at a bar, soaking in the tequila. The sombreros got to talking and soon discovered they all despised their owners. “My man,” a sombrero said, “came home drunk every night and beat his wife and children with a hard stick he kept just for that purpose.” Another sombrero confessed that his owner sat on a porch and shot cats that had strayed into his garden. He skinned the cats and displayed their pelts over the fireplace.

She used the word alabaster too often. And breath, as if her body always knew what lay ahead,
the repetition of need. Even absence became a title. Even then long shadows danced in the room,
wind slithering under the door. There was a hint of that tricky left eye, still squinting, an itch to
become worse. Fire had its annual appearance, though not at first, and always confused with a
sense of death or doom. Throughout there was a certain rage, a questioning, “how can this be?”
Rage might be a response to events, or it might have always simmered, a disorder from birth.