1.
As a boy I plucked maple leaves from their trees.
I would lay in the warm shaded grass and study the
immaculate fissures and veins; the conduits of color and
verdure that, when choked, burn so lush and florid.
Then I turned my hand over in the vermiculate webs
of sun and shade, latticed and swimming, rubbing my fingers
over the shallow channels and meridians of my palm, the
promontories of my corpuscles, the soft saturnine ridges
of my arteries and my pale purple capillaries.
The sun and shade swimming. The leaves tossing, photosynthesizing,
breathing in their way. Cloud shadows coursing over the grass
like fish in a clear river.
2.
There was a dry river bed that bisected my village in Greece.
It was rocky and shallow and forgotten. Stray dogs roamed it,
picking through garbage, through the bones of small fish, their ribs
like the struts of a Viking ship in a child’s diorama. But when it rained
in the mountains the riverbed became an ephemeral torrent, a lucid dream
gushing and gurgling to the Aegean. There is a monastery in these
mountains I sometimes visited. Its courtyard full of lemon trees,
stones cracked with sun like the face of an old woman. Down below
were the olive groves and orange groves, blankets of dry green.
I would walk through the groves at night, looking at the stars,
listening to the soft melodious wind singing, the trees’ knobby
bodies and branches swaying sweetly like young boys and girls
in love for the first time. From the monastery, the riverbed
carves through these groves, resembling that old woman’s face,
or those fissures in stone. Or, it resembles the skeleton
of a maple tree in winter, barren.
3.
My nephew, when he was very young, liked to take me by the
hand and guide me through his backyard. The yard itself was denuded,
bare. But its border was ringed with trees. Maples and elms and
oaks. My nephew would walk us from one to another, and look
up in wonder at their thatched, naked bodies, the thin cold sky
beyond. He would point. Tree, he would try to say, but it
came out twee. At the elm, he pointed his plump, knobby
fingers. Twee. At the oak, twee. At the maple, again: twee.
We sat together on the hard frozen earth, looking up. Wondering
at the branches and limbs, their patterns. Twee, he said. Yes,
twee, twee. Tree.
4.
The branches and arteries of Detroit splay on the flat etymological
land. It is nighttime, descending. The byways and intersections
pulse and contract like amoebas, spiral like galaxies
combusted from the dark earth. I can see individual cars.
In them: lives unimaginable. They disperse like blood or oxygen.
Bearing love; delusions, too, and loss. I bear my own.
The factories lurk like bomb craters and the grid
blinks like a switchboard. Leaks like phosphorescence
into the sensual curve of the horizon.
5.
I recognize that curve in a museum. London, I think,
or maybe Paris, or Rome. Beauty blurs in this fashion,
like all the afternoons I whittled away in bed with Lucia.
So many of them they become one, disappear in the elongation
of a shadow that spreads over the constellations of
freckles on her cheeks and nose, over nipples, her ribs, the
fine spider veins that delineate her thighs, the muscles
of her feet that are like the coves and mountains of the
south Spanish coast, wind chiseled, sea hollowed.
But the shadow is over that curve. She is on her side,
it is that arc of leg beneath her hip. It’s a Picasso,
a long smooth line scarring or slicing those
indecipherable cubes, those vibrating fractals of sun.
The city flattening into the imperfect parabola of night.