---

Address to Andreas Vesalius

I am brittle like the brittle star.
I planted
gladiolas in the rich earth,
and ate a diet of milk.

I describe myself as
I would a mushroom:
orange-red, polished, fragile, milk white,
black where bruised.

Maybe my face was milk white when you told me.
Maybe my face was milk white when I realized.
Maybe I burned the words you wrote on the page.

The white bread and the milk consumed,
pure soft water poured over the soil.
I hold the mushroom upside down, gills pink,
breathe the scent of pears.

---

Address to Alan Turing

The mind fills with extrapolations
as these bicycle rides seem endless.
Daisies rest as if on the tip of a pen.

The machine is beautiful.
The machine is driven by algorithm alone,
by which you solve every conceivable computation.

Behind the drapes is a voice indistinguishable from a machine.
The room is occupied by few minds, but great thought.
A mind is made to be purchased and consumed.

Baskets full of apples you rode by
as the machine interpreted wonder in hyperboloids of light.
Sound is translated.

---

Address to Francesco Redi (excerpt)

II.     A beautiful swarm of bees

I did not waste time seeking the bees in the entrails of the decayed bull. The whole carcass was buried,
horns protruding. Later they sawed off the horns and out bees flew. It was not a carcass, but a skeleton
without flesh.

You have put meat near an apiary and the bees, being dainty, would not go near it. The hornets and
wasps carried balls of flesh to their nests. You believe the bee will not eat meat unless forced to by
famine.

---

Before Phrygian Powder and Pettit’s Eye Salve

I said: there will be no way for you to see past this fog.
You said: there is nothing on the other side of the eyelid for me;
the breaking of the dust around the cornea,
the shaping of lashes,
the painting with color,
was done without purpose.

From touch, you say, you can identity a breach birth,
remove a single strand of hair from an infant’s mouth.

I said: seek my face.
You said: my pearlescent eyes will never be cleared of their nacre;
do not bring me the calendula flowers,
yellow precipitate, Spanish saffron, or camphor.

---

Address to Hippocrates

On the Sacred Disease,
there are now over forty types.

Could I save you more easily
if by demon than by heredity.

I walked outside and the sun
was no longer the sun,
and the earth was no longer earth,
and the water was no longer the water
and the air was no longer air
and the fire was no longer fire.

Could I be more
secure in prayers
and a basin of holy water
than in treatment.

The spring was blood,
the summer was yellow
the autumn was black.

I am trying to achieve balance,
even when the gait shifts
and the hands and arms move,
as if in a dance.

---

Covid-19

We who lived as two apples
ripening on one branch,
so close we began to fuse,

now live on opposite coasts.
With your asthma, if infected—
[ I can’t say it ] I can’t

stand by your bedside.
I won’t press my palm
against the protective glass

between me and you.
And oh god if you die,
believe me, I will die too

while still living like a dried
gourd. Shake me to hear
my empty percussion,

my little reliquary of bones.
If death comes wheezing and gasping
for me, I want to but won’t be

under the earth beside you.

---

Killing the Colony

I had no particular malice
toward the tiny ants trotting
over my kitchen counter, close
to towers of creamer and sugar,

even spoke to them as they carried
breadcrumbs and boulders of spilled sweet.
They lived and I wished them to live;
wished my words were more

than senseless distant thunder,
that I could tell them to search
and gather in the sun, not under
my dull buttery fluorescence.

But I could not live with them,
even as I wiped the counter clean
around them gently, I knew.
I bought the traps and put them down,

watched them march behind the coffee
and carry nubs of death back to the colony,
so diligent, so delicate, so small.
It was like you and I:

I without malice and without wanting
to cause the throes of loving’s death,
poisoned our love nonetheless,
thinking it necessary, thinking

there’s no other way to separate
what is yours from what is mine.

---

Low Tide

A poem is stuck in my throat.

Yesterday I walked at low tide,
saw the seafloor undressed:
bits of broken bottle in olive and sheer,
deserted crab, clam, and razor shells,
abandoned by soft living flesh,
leaving only husks.
Several fused together in the mud,
a damp opalescent emptiness.

A poem is caught in my fingertips.

Once when the sea lifted her shimmering skirts
the sloop of the sun was sailing
ashore in clouds and the mud glowed
lavender, orange, fleshy pink.
I said to my lover, find your phone,
but he said, in a moment this will be gone,
he said, the camera can’t capture it anyway,
so we sat on the porch and drank wine
while the colors shifted and faded.
I’ve never seen its like again.

A poem has clogged up my pen.

If you live long by the sea
you’ll grow to love the low tide
odor of rot and faint tinge of feces
overlaid with salt. If by the docks,
the smell of displaced fish,
their slow death when netted
and lifted from the brine.
If you live by the sea a long time,
so they say. I’m merely at the hinge of years
where now I do not mind.

A poem is coaxed onto the page

and perhaps now the sea will swell in,
fill in the wells where the small lives struggle,
release them again into the cool dark depths.

---

content warning for gun violence

Ripples

Each bullet is like a rock
thrown in a lake. The ripples—
bloodstained pictures

lodged in survivors’ minds,
in their bodies, like volcanoes
that will erupt again & again

through the coming years.
The hollow absence of a life
more permanent than any scar

echoing through the bodies
of those who loved the dead.
The ripples widen, widen,

they cover the world—

*

I watched a video on Facebook
of large dog clinging to ice
in a half-melted river.

A fireman inches out to him,
grabs him, is dragged back
by his comrades. They hurry

the dog into an ambulance.
The EMTs dry and rub him.
Come back, boy; Hang in there, boy.

One EMT stethoscopes
for a heartbeat under the damp fur.
We’ve got a heartbeat, he yells,

and the EMTs cheer.
This is the default setting
for a human being.

*

Once a boy I loved
threw a rock into my pond.
At first I only felt it sink,

felt its weight at the bottom
of me. Later I would know
the ripples, as one by one

they spread to water my years.
It was like waking from a dream
to discover you’re still dreaming

and then waking again.
And again. Yet I’m a lucky one;
I’m still alive.

*

At least 29 dead in two days.
Dozens wounded.
Can you feel the ripples?

Can you feel them crashing
like strong and salty waves
over the back of your head?

Can you taste the salt of tears
in your mouth, the years and years
of them yet to come?

Can you feel the undertow?
Are you drowning? Are we all
drowning?

---

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

At age seven or eight when my grandmother died,
I was in gym class, in the center of the vaulted gym,
perhaps in the middle of Duck Duck Goose,

when, as if clouds had descended for a storm,
or as if a soaking rain had drenched me, suddenly,
the great clanging bell of grief rang within me.

I was confused—Why should I, a child
playing a game, be sad?—and the answer
came from a chamber of knowing within me

that until that moment had been shut:
Your grandmother has died. I cast
about the room, half expecting to see her

standing in a corner beyond the white lines
of the basketball court, or smiling from the stage
used for the kindergarten play.

My father was concerned when, picking me up
from ballet class that evening, I did not react
to his terrible news, news that I already knew.

*

In one episode of Forensic Files,
a young woman is murdered
during her drive home at night.

At home, although there was as yet
no reason for concern, her father
stood up from his recliner, gathered

his keys, drove the dark roads
in search of her, because, in his words,
he heard her cry out to his soul.

*

Likewise, on the night my dog,
alone in the dark of the vet clinic,
in his cage, with his fathomless eyes

and tiny IV, realized he was leaving
this earth, I was awoken by
his soul’s shout, and for a moment

considered driving to the clinic,
and how to break down the heavy doors
of the clinic: they were locked,

what was I to do? Then a calm fell,
an emptiness, a silence. When I awoke
the next morning, no one had to explain

the wailing of my mother,
the pile of tissues on the table
beside her.

*

Scientists say that for years
after a tree has been cut down
the nearby trees continue

to send via the great network
of their roots, food
to the felled tree’s stump.

*

So are all of us connected
by roots and threads of some
ethereal substance,

by a deep knowing, one
to another to another until
like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

we are all known to one another,
are kin, our cores vibrating
in unison, an intricate web

of the finest, thinnest cords,
that some call Humanity,
some call Love, some call God.