Labrador Tea Labrador leaves in a jar with a kerchief lid release an arctic aroma when simmered on a stove. Yesterday when fire broke out in the bosque, the air had the stench of cauliflower in a steamer when water has evaporated and the pot scalds. Although Apache plume, along with clusters of western peppergrass, makes fragrant the wash, owls that frequent the hole high up the bank of the arroyo have already come and gone. Yesterday, though honey locust leaves shimmered in a gust, I marveled no wasp nest had yet formed under the porch. Repotting a spathiphyllum, then uncoiling a hose, I suddenly hear surf through open slats of a door. Sprinklers come on in the dark; a yellow slug crawls on a rain- slicked banana leaf; as the mind flits, imbibes, leaves clothed underneath with rusty hairs suffuse a boreal light glistening on tidal pools. [End Page 17] [Begin Page 20] The Chromatics of Dawn Navel oranges ripen on branches near the steps to a porch. He recalls zigzagging along a path marked by white stones through a lava flow to a beach where violet morning glories flared. Up the coast he once peered into the water but could not make out the underwater shrine frequented by black-tipped reef sharks. He tries to delineate the sheen of rolling waves, chromatics of the hour when light pales the unfolded paper shades to the south- facing French doors. Last week they rolled up architectural plans, along with sun-bleached red paper inscribed with gold characters, and torched them in the hearth. As they remodel, they ponder how a floor of repeating strips of bolted oak and cement can be replicated; but, at his fingertips, he knows nothing can be replicated: neither the hair in her hairbrush, nor the hole in his sock, neither the hue of sunrise, nor waves of opalescent spring sleet. Yardangs She who can't sleep takes a sleeping pill, then another, then another. A crab apple in the yard blossoms along the curve of spring. Along a stone wall, we yearn for a line of Japanese irises that do not appear. Who glimpses a body on a stretcher loaded into an ambulance? In the winter of spring, a neighbor frets over air-pollution vectors; a teenage girl worries her horse slashes [End Page 20] its neck along barbed wire. Prevailing winds: west-northwest. As a physicist posits all languages have a single root, I weigh arête, yardang, strike canyon, ciénega, tsé bit'a'í: Shiprock, the rock with wings. But is there bedrock? Scent of your breasts and hair. Who is of the Bitter Water Clan? A red tulip in a glass droops within hours. Tremor at how z, x, y puts form into danger. Fractals Stopped at an intersection, ruminating on how, in a game of go, to consider all the possible moves until the end would take a computer longer than the expected lifetime of the universe, you flit from piccolo to stovepipe in a letter, to scrutinizing faces while standing in line at the post office, to weather forecast—does a snowflake have an infinite number of possible shapes?— consider, only last weekend, a wasp threaded along a screen door in south light; mark the impulse to—not see this, do that—water leafing pear trees along a curved driveway, relax the intricate open work mesh of spring; recall lifting a packet of flax seeds off the counter, and, checking for an expiration date, note—red light, green light— sow when danger of frost is past, then go, go. [End Page 21] Departures and Arrivals An accountant leaning over a laptop frets: I have botched this, bungled that— he is not focused on numbers or accounts; a taxi driver at an airport has no time to contemplate rippling shadows of ginkgo leaves but swerves between a van and truck; a reinsurance analyst obsesses over a one-in-ten probability that a hurricane will scour the Florida Gulf Coast, while an air-pollution expert is assigned the...
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Aug 23, 2006
Gloria I López + 1
Open Access