little dead things . . .” asks Oscar de Milosz.
Where?
A sugar egg is their temporary home.
Open air version: on the hill overlooking the Circus Maximus in Rome, the chariots gone; the racket of horses colliding, gone; the pile-up leaving a way for the lesser horse and that victory-by-default, all gone. Time doing its tricks, so the deep quiet enfolds. Even as the traffic rushes by behind you.
A camera: last century’s, the head and back draped, one eye to the glass, for the long, dark passage toward oceanliner, great fire, beloved’s face.
Sea Monkeys in a jar. Ordered from the back of an Archie comic. Aquiline, shirred: there he is. I’m sure that’s the one, with his little gold crown, fuzzily perched: King Sea Monkey. And floating around, waiting to attend his Highness—all the Monkeys of his court. So that he might best survey his royal waters, rule his tepid kingdom from on high, I shall lift him onto my finger into the air. (Of course I don’t. But I want to.)
Under a thirty-year-old microscope, the thirty-year-old slides showing the liver cells of a frog, their still-shapely coronas and gray, hazy stars. The heart of frog and bottlebrush spore, featherfowl point and butterfly scale. No longer “prettily a-moving” as Anton van Leewenhoek said of his animalcules, but held, stilled, still available—if a little yellowed, a little dry.
The tiny person folded knees-to-chest contained in the head of a sperm, the homunculus in his watery world: yes. Even if a conjecture, and sketched from only that.
Leewenhoek destroying his specially ground lenses before his death, that hoarding: no.
The enormous prize bull at the Ohio State Fair, whose testicles stunned even the solemn farmers into low, whistling analogy, cantaloupes, watermelons (no kidding), as they stepped back. Stepping back: yes, lengthening the scene, so awe has a little room to breathe. That courtesy.
Not the real-but-stuffed bear in the dining room of the Pennsylvania brewhaus, but en route, the bear nailed to the barn wall, splayed like a star. The body aloft and flying, and the barn, a terrible, red wind behind it. And everything framed and reduced by the car window as we slowed down to get a better look.
What is gazing into a sugar egg? A way of being sealed away, destiny-less, in a sanctuary with no purpose at all, save being led. A way of being a child reading under a sheet with a flashlight. Half-moon shadows on the page. Finger eclipses over the words. And in the web between thumb and forefinger, the reddened streams of veins. The very river you’re reading about, the mighty Mississippi right there. Right there in your hand, near the warm, pliable rim of shore.
Ships in bottles.
Lighthouses? No, because they have a job. But a lighthouse in a bottle: yes.
If, as Thoreau wrote, “A lake ... is the earth’s eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature,” then consider, too, the ice of a lake into which things are frozen. Lake Erie ice, the sky griping on, unmelodious, moody, and someone’s there now, at the end of the pier, in the very spot where I once was, looking over to Canada. If I were to go on about the cold that winter in Cleveland, my long flu, the solid grays scouring the sky, reminiscence would choke out the space I’m considering: there in the ice, stuff pinned with clear darts of air, and below that, the movement of water still visible.
Small pond in summer: leaning over the edge of a rowboat and seeing down through clear water. At the pool, with goggles: the rough bottom and a few pennies. In the ocean, tucking under the claw of a wave. I don’t remember learning that trick, just one day being safely below and the force rolling over, grazing my back. The wild, colloidal spin just above and how quiet it was, and unlikely, that calm.
A cricket in a cage: the delicacy, lightness, quickness of the captured thing. The impermanence of those
Where?
A sugar egg is their temporary home.
Open air version: on the hill overlooking the Circus Maximus in Rome, the chariots gone; the racket of horses colliding, gone; the pile-up leaving a way for the lesser horse and that victory-by-default, all gone. Time doing its tricks, so the deep quiet enfolds. Even as the traffic rushes by behind you.
A camera: last century’s, the head and back draped, one eye to the glass, for the long, dark passage toward oceanliner, great fire, beloved’s face.
Sea Monkeys in a jar. Ordered from the back of an Archie comic. Aquiline, shirred: there he is. I’m sure that’s the one, with his little gold crown, fuzzily perched: King Sea Monkey. And floating around, waiting to attend his Highness—all the Monkeys of his court. So that he might best survey his royal waters, rule his tepid kingdom from on high, I shall lift him onto my finger into the air. (Of course I don’t. But I want to.)
Under a thirty-year-old microscope, the thirty-year-old slides showing the liver cells of a frog, their still-shapely coronas and gray, hazy stars. The heart of frog and bottlebrush spore, featherfowl point and butterfly scale. No longer “prettily a-moving” as Anton van Leewenhoek said of his animalcules, but held, stilled, still available—if a little yellowed, a little dry.
The tiny person folded knees-to-chest contained in the head of a sperm, the homunculus in his watery world: yes. Even if a conjecture, and sketched from only that.
Leewenhoek destroying his specially ground lenses before his death, that hoarding: no.
The enormous prize bull at the Ohio State Fair, whose testicles stunned even the solemn farmers into low, whistling analogy, cantaloupes, watermelons (no kidding), as they stepped back. Stepping back: yes, lengthening the scene, so awe has a little room to breathe. That courtesy.
Not the real-but-stuffed bear in the dining room of the Pennsylvania brewhaus, but en route, the bear nailed to the barn wall, splayed like a star. The body aloft and flying, and the barn, a terrible, red wind behind it. And everything framed and reduced by the car window as we slowed down to get a better look.
What is gazing into a sugar egg? A way of being sealed away, destiny-less, in a sanctuary with no purpose at all, save being led. A way of being a child reading under a sheet with a flashlight. Half-moon shadows on the page. Finger eclipses over the words. And in the web between thumb and forefinger, the reddened streams of veins. The very river you’re reading about, the mighty Mississippi right there. Right there in your hand, near the warm, pliable rim of shore.
Ships in bottles.
Lighthouses? No, because they have a job. But a lighthouse in a bottle: yes.
If, as Thoreau wrote, “A lake ... is the earth’s eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature,” then consider, too, the ice of a lake into which things are frozen. Lake Erie ice, the sky griping on, unmelodious, moody, and someone’s there now, at the end of the pier, in the very spot where I once was, looking over to Canada. If I were to go on about the cold that winter in Cleveland, my long flu, the solid grays scouring the sky, reminiscence would choke out the space I’m considering: there in the ice, stuff pinned with clear darts of air, and below that, the movement of water still visible.
Small pond in summer: leaning over the edge of a rowboat and seeing down through clear water. At the pool, with goggles: the rough bottom and a few pennies. In the ocean, tucking under the claw of a wave. I don’t remember learning that trick, just one day being safely below and the force rolling over, grazing my back. The wild, colloidal spin just above and how quiet it was, and unlikely, that calm.
A cricket in a cage: the delicacy, lightness, quickness of the captured thing. The impermanence of those
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