Study of extreme closeups.
There is something to know about the parts that are not here.
Move the lens again. Closer and still. Guess what this is. What
looks like a forest is a few square millimeters of flower head.
And what seems like desert stones framing gem is lizard eye.
That fairytale forest is moss on rock, and the apparent geode
is squamous cells from cheek swab. Point the lens and still.
Closer and shoot again. You want to see.
And the cosmological constant.
The doctor is telling me that dark energy is more fluid than the matter I am used to, which seems like somewhat of a gross assumption about my given norms, but I am not in the mood to be difficult so I let it slide and then he leaves the room, and me in it with a sense that things might be pulling away, looking for a phrase opposite to “lightbulb moment” and it’s fitting, I suppose, that I have yet to find it.
***
Inspired by this article in Knowable, exploring how an early dark energy idea offers a way to resolve a problem known as the Hubble tension.
New lens on old skins.
She makes collage from the books of nudes but there is nothing reckless about her approach. She’s like a surgeon. Look. This one looks like a flower, and you think you are getting the obvious metaphor but then she calls it target and you look again and there it is. Bullseye.
I cut the way I was taught to use scissors, she says. Meaning gently, as with paper dolls. I do not tear the figures, she says. Ever. I do not rip, even when I would sometimes like to feel myself as someone who would. But it isn’t in me; I am too careful for that, she says. Instead, she holds and she studies, learning how to look. I follow the lines. I scoop them up, she says, of the nudes. To give them new meaning.
***
Inspired by the work of Justine Kurland.
Righteous words.
Perhaps it seemed like the right time
to make a kind of point. Result being,
a door almost opened suddenly shuts.
Cold again.
Hard landing on empty threshold,
no more than a common symptom
of misplaced hope. Don’t mention it.
Point of contact.
Closer. Lens moves over hillside, black with ash from the last burn. Find the fire poppies above the road. Where are they and the first call when it comes is a reminder: check the nightstand lock the doors.
Who is safe is a not a question. She holds it. Describe the sound of water eroding a mountain. With the cold moon come hungry dogs to howl night.
Father seeking son, without the right address. Where do you send the words to tell him, Son I am thinking. To tell him what. To tell him finally. Of you and mean it. And imagine that he reads.
But if the numbers are wrong you cannot deliver. We cannot be delivered without the right numbers and until they come every stranger looks like a prayer almost answered and only a few of these look up.
Take notice when looking for a son and see one there on his knees beside the shoulder where it’s time to look and look again. When no movement follows call but the wind of passing cars in roadside sage then call again and wait.
Hold the name against your tongue. Against the soft skin of the roof of your mouth. Of the son with no roof to shield his head. Don’t say it. Closer, calling hey and are you to the stranger and alright and how does anyone answer this now except to say yes except to indicate the pulse that means still living but it’s the rising blooms from the ash you need now.
Move the lens. This distance from the burn will yield nothing. Go in.
Early lessons in looking.
Children reviewed scenarios. What to do when you are lost in a wilderness with no aid and no promise of its coming. A book might say if they found the right one, how to leave a trail by walking through what is soft. To stop at intervals to write HELP in the snow in the sand in the mud with an arrow pointing in the direction of the feet. How if the course is reversed. To travel back over the prints. To alert anyone who is looking, if anyone is looking, not to go beyond the tracks. To follow the lines of roads and rivers and listen well. If a party calls, they will use an unusual word. Three syllables. Internet! Coconut! Spaghetti! Leave personal items behind. But who has the book.
You can learn to look this way, scanning the horizon for smoke signals, for mirror flash, to train the ear to hear the distant cry. But how did you learn to meet it, children wondered, of the expectation that anyone grown would know where to go when it was time, and when? When the wind comes. Who ties it all down. They cut the books of questions into strips, folded each line into a basket. They would need more for the carrying.
Notes from Crete.
There is a certain pitch to plans made in prison, not
like the half-baked dreams of anywhere else. The wings
as real as the wax, and the sun, the son the sum of the
parts you gave, dreaming him. There are flowered
children elsewhere in a field that never knew walls
except on set and you cannot blame them for the
glow of their faces how they won’t age it takes
absorption to do that but to these it’s all water
rolling, the waves the waves the duck’s
back all joy and fun except
for the highlights the chase scenes so
good for ratings so good for saying watch
look what I did. No sense explaining to the scions
of such gentle suns how yours will kill you, quick.
Offer anyway what you have of shelter and an
ear to the running stream of tears. They roll
off the backs of them stop looking for
logic they roll because those backs are
the backs of the sons of the sun,
o child
how I wish to pretend.
From the edge of a day.
Find it by nightfall, the living wet familiar, still unsinged. Float a string of yourself to what begins from the land of the dead in living earth between us. Not total fog. No unobstructed view––an edge. Only this, so take hold. I know you wanted. We looked, remember? How it never made anything but us.
Gone the crayon-blue sky, the bicycle spoke arms of yellow suns to catch us up inside sheep clouds. Here is sheet of rain and not the fat drops, distended snow globes reflecting like faces we knew, like some place of love without return, hold on. There is a sound on the roof.
It is birds, baby. They fall.
Under an unforgiving sun.
Broken white lines follow interstate miles home through the valley of the sun. Before it sets, bring the telescope. Look for Jupiter and let Mars rise above a Mesa into Phoenix until they are each a distant glow in the mirror and dream of rising again. And Joshua trees keep watch. To think they guard us as we fall into ghosts of former towns from when we knew them, still living, still ours and still––
someone stands after forty miles of nothing under a tarp in the place where a porch would be and there is no way not to wonder if the waiting of so many at such distance might be stretching. Something tight like Achilles’ unblessed tendon still reaching––
––for the water that crossed us once a sacred chord ready to play until it pleased the long-haired keeper of the secret ways we dreamed, even if.
All the while, to anyone who asked, most of us were good enough to protest protection, saying instead, just let it. Come. We said with straight faces, meaning to mean the words.
The distance between action and call.
I can be mother, too! he offered, thinking of cameos and not the tedium of tending.
But I can weave! He insisted, stomping the last of the grass.
What about fire? I can make it! But there was no wood.
A sacrament, then, anything but penance!
Purification sounded lofty, so long as the means was anything but silence.
A song! ––His chest swelled to the imaginary chorus. But she had given those already, to deaf ears.
I will dance you to the moon! But her feet were bruised from carrying his weight.
He claimed to want a friend, some unifying vision. At last he arrived, the ever-faithful witness to the glory of his own reflection, and its deep pools went on and on.
