Category: creature watching

Aquarian Drip

These dazzling portraits.

When the artist came to visit, we were moved by the shining colors in attendance.

We had questions. One was, how would you describe the world you are building?

There are all these characters, see? Part divine and part human, all in a state of transformation. During each metamorphosis, a being glows these wild colors. It’s magical.

Are these self-portraits?

A lot of them are, partly. Also, part fiction, part archetype.

Can you talk about your materials?

They are loaded. They appear to be surface-level decorations. And yet, the objects themselves emerge from grief. So many people were dying. I was thinking of memorials, how decorative they are. And then I had all these sequins, and was like, I know what to do with those! 

Because people are so much, you know? All these glittering layers, and then when they are gone, you have all this extra sometimes, this overflowing sense of all you see, all you wanted to say, all that they were beyond the simple obit. 

It wasn’t long after I started down this path that I was like, I am going to need a lot more sequins. 

***

Inspired by the work of Devan Shimoyama. The title of this post comes from one of Shimoyama’s paintings.

Swimming Lessons

And other notes.

Let’s rehearse, she told us. Lick this joy first, wherever you can find it. Even there, she said, at the bitter root. Especially there. Because this part will kill you, but this part will restore the dead. These are the same plant, child, do you hear me?

Survival demands distance from what kills you, and yet here is your life. To remind you how you will never get close enough. Only keep returning, back and back to that which makes you want to run.

Here is the cave of the dragon. Here is the belly of the whale. Here are the bowels of the ship, the depths of the sea, the strangest creatures you have known. You recognize them, don’t you? 

Here is flight: suspended, perfect peace. Now the absence of the air you need. Now the desperate kick, up and out of its saving embrace.

Up to the surface. You can still see. Linger. Notice what shines as its holds you. Now back again, down. Down.

A reading of “Swimming Lessons”

The Visitors

Calling with matters of life and death.

The round bird call was constant. Its audience would no sooner hush life than they would have thought to banish death. These creatures tended to hide when we approached, as some children are cautious after being abruptly silenced, in the crouching way that the banished will learn to move.

It was rare that we heard her full song, and just as rare to witness the extravagant leaps and turns of her dance, the revelation of her full plumage something she had learned to save for the shadows.

And yet she would emerge sometimes, with the upright carriage of a dancer, to find us in our own reflections at the water’s edge, barely listening, as was our custom. With a deft fingertip she would nudge the temples, saying look up. 

Go, she would say. Go to the babies and hold them, for they are like us, too.

To Hold Them

On the real work.

At the end of a long day in a long month, I read a hiring notice: Professional Cub Snuggler! it says, and I think, this is something. The work is to wrap baby bears in blankets, hold them in a coat while the mother gets a checkup. 

Now I can’t stop wishing that this was a model for some other things, the practice of stopping in the work week, no matter the job, for the most important work of the week. Time to hold the babies! everyone would say, and the babies would be held, and there would be enough hands so that the ones who had been caring for more babies than they had hands for could take a break and tend to other things, knowing the babies were okay.

There is a trick the handlers use, for getting the orphaned bears accepted. They cover the bark of a tree with a scented goo, and after the birth babies and the orphan run through it, back to mama, they all smell the same. And there’s something in this model, too. 

***

Inspired by this notice: “Dream Job Alert: Michigan DNR is Hiring Bear Cub Cuddlers.”

Fevers

And springs.

Blame the rude lift of shaggy grasses in the hot breath of wind, or blame the running horses for allowing our approach, or the unknown forces hiding behind facades of lifelessness, the array of them unlimited as the wild of fallen feathers in the last song of the dreariness we pretended to know before the brooding effigies of childhood toys wept us forward to long-dormant animal screams, to be caught by the insouciant tongue of this luxuriant lush where bur clumps catch the skin and horseflies shine mad at midday against a chorus of swarms convulsing at the grate.

Blame this teasing glimpse of spring for returning these creatures to something more than what we were in our cold rooms of polite decorum, before our days shed silver scales to this teeming fever, to reveal the honeysweet fire of protuberant growth, dripping conduits of some fierce insistence too raw to submit to any address more refined than the primordial word for teasing us back into this unnamed all.

Weathers

Inside outs.

With exhaustion’s heavy fog rolling thick against the day, it is too much to find the lines of the perimeters I am expected to seal. Then comes a dovetail reversal. Fever burns a midday sun’s cruel brilliance, blinding against the snow. The long melt follows but still not the lines. Hands defy the premise of trespass, insisting. Here is no territory, but soil.

You ask where the time is going. I can’t answer. Someone calls, inside! I look to where we came from, and the door stands ajar, its half-open hesitancy hiding some threshold creature, looking back.

For whom I, on the other side of its pause, must be another threshold creature, looking back.

The Unmapped

On what is good and lost.

One theory is that you know you have arrived when you can get yourself good and lost without worry over getting home. This assumes no one is waiting for your arrival, or the meal you would make, or the rent––difficult to pull off in a given day, and yet in the suspended space of making what we make, I suppose it happens all the time. But just as I am starting to think, here is something, I am back to thinking of the birds falling from the sky, whole flocks of them discovered in the aftermath––but also once a snowy owl, living, in a tree near the local library, and the punk defiance of the tiny nest that once appeared on the electrical box, and the lizard that looked back as we crouched to see him beneath the cabinet, the cat and I, and maybe the point is only to lose the trepidation over being fatally human––into a wider web, woven of strands this limited sight is still unable to detect. 

What are the Chances

Of seeing any.

Chance is a lot more patient than most people think. Take this one, for example. She waits by his bed where he complains he is often awake, worrying she’ll never come again. But every time she shows up, there he is, snoring. He wakes on occasion, to cry about his misfortune. She waits, listening. She’s not one to speak right away, and by the time she does, he’s unconscious again. He sleeps and she turns out the light before leaving. In the morning he’ll decide it’s too bad that he missed those chances from another time, crying about how they never visit anymore.

Acrobats

Playing chase.

We knew better than to argue but we couldn’t help resisting certain distinctions between the sublime and the ridiculous, laughter and horror. Awe and dread. It was all of these and everywhere at once, and they scolded us for laughing at the wrong times.

When was the right time? we wondered. But it was always not yet. So much applause everywhere for the questing hero, but our supple forms learned something else in those years. How accepting and bearing what may come might be wild acts of giving. It was impossible to wait, but we loved our mothers.

Ashes, ashes we were all arcs and curves, falling down and back again, swinging between force and grace, dance and non-dance, gravestones and oleander, the bright horizon, and the way it shattered in the spray. Rose quartz and granite, sand. You, and your eyes. We played at not blinking until we lost again, shouting I won!

Careful, the greybeards would say as we ran back out into the cold. You’ll catch your death. But it was our lives we were after and death was the feathered brush at the base of the spine, coming hard and we could hear it at our backs. We played at tagging it into a temporary pause but then it would turn, and we knew.

Run! We called back and forth to each other when the only response was fast as you can.