Francine Sterle

Artemisia Gentileschi A woman in a man's world, a woman making a claim, choosing her own body as the source of inspiration, wearing, as Pittura did, a gold chain bearing the mask of imitation: her tousled hair and muscled arms, the shifting gold-green colors of her dress, her sleeve rolled to the elbow, the light striking  her brow and the shadow made by the mask-shaped charm against flesh, the double mirrors she used to paint herself, the act of it captured mid-gesture, the paint laid out as her father taught her: white near the thumb then red, brown, green, her well-curved body bending around the canvas, the calculated self-image occupying the full height of the picture, her unromanticized face, dramatically lit, composed, the bare bodice, the rolled-up sleeve, her eyes turned upward, her right arm raised, its movement frozen, the mind in motion, her wide, searching gaze.

rain frog          thorn bug          tent bat along a broken mosaic    a spongy    ever-dwindling path soaring trees    woody buttresses    their massive twisted fins lofty crowns    shoulder to shoulder    climbing lime-green vines    restless palms    one strangling plant    clinging to choking another    a discontinuous canopy of branches and leaves impenetrable    alive and teeming    tangled underbrush the deeply shaded soil    lumpy roots    writhing across the forest floor    low-growing ferns    seedlings struggling for light    jewel-colored hummingbirds insects sizzling and clicking and the dripping water trickling into the tiniest crevices    steamy claustrophobic air    a dazzling bellbird    lost in a shaft of sunlight    a golden eyelash viper sinuous as a vein on a broad-leafed frond    flat worms land leeches    walnut-sized spiders    goliath beetles camouflaged butterflies on dead leaves    parasites    bees leaf-cutting ants atop glorious white lilies    everywhere gripping    climbing    twisting    floating through the trees stilt-like aerial roots    the mouth-amazed pitcher plant buried larvae    fruit-eating fish    the perpetual battle to adapt the ruthless drive    to survive under a punishing sun what grows    bursts forth at astonishing speed    then decomposes to be reabsorbed    so much unknown    unfamiliar unnamed    but before long    the trees seem the same the rocks    every bird track    who would dare think of such a place who would dare        construct one         of his own imagining and be utterly abandoned    in the middle of it all if to be lost is to be fully present    if confusion becomes the only boundary    and then    the decision    [to divide space until a direction is created]    only a madman would begin thought is its own cage    the mind    already anticipating the first step    deciding    every turn will be coupled by disaster    and perhaps    some bestial creature crouched at the center    crying    waiting for our hero    our everyman    our Elijah wandering the earth in rags

The first time I went to the tree was to knock on wood. No one answered. The second time I knocked, the tree, wild in the wind, leaned toward me. No bad luck arrived. I went back and knocked again to tell the tree my good fortune was not forgotten. • Chiseling a nest hole in dead wood, a woodpecker drills a downed log. The rapid blows of its beak hammer me awake each night for a week. • Beneath the bark nymphs live like hidden charms people leave in drawers or cupboards for protection. I believe in tree spirits who embed their souls in this wood. • They are not immortal • but their lives, says Hesiod, are ten times that of the phoenix, who outlives nine ravens, who outlive three glorious stags, who outlive four crows, who outlive nine generations of aged men. • Beyond the shelter- belts of farmsteads, found deep in poplar woods and birch thickets, a flicker assaults a tree as nymphs retreat into the tunneled ruts of the trunk. The bird chips away without distraction. Its showy red patch, a splash of blood, catches my eye. • Tender wing buds of an immature insect are like the rising nipples of a young girl. The temptation to slide a finger over the small mounds... • Fly away! • The nymphs are free, changed forever as they brush the pond's scalloped edge. What part of me they take away will settle some day. Deep in dying wood. I will be there when you knock.

Of 385 varieties, to make the simplest all you need are two sticks: one vertical; the other, horizontal. Call one time; one, space or life—death, good—evil, male—female. You choose. Any polarity will do as long as the cross-piece cuts across the one upright. Now, it's a human form with arms outstretched. Rub them together. A couple of sparks, a few more, a flash of light, a slow increase in heat, and radiating around you: uncontainable fire.

how much of the map could be labeled terraincognita how much        unknown        invisible to others how much of myself    could I shake off abandon               those undiscovered places [I barely know]        exist though the map is not the territory how I am drawn        to leave behind the pattern for the path        for a minute an hour        for one whole day I'd be like a Wintu               describing the body using cardinal directions he touches me on the west arm the river is to the east when we return          his east arm circles around me        and the river stays to the west

All night an accelerating geometry of eyes—hundreds shaped like birds or boats or beetles, simplified to dots or crosses or a pair of 2s or mis- matched diamonds, perfect zeros, scoops of moon placed sidewise or lengthwise on a face, slipping out of orbit on a cheek, hung under an ear, planted mid-forehead, paper-thin planes of them, each one alive and staring from the dislocated faces of wives, lovers, mothers, serene and lopsided, splintered, wrenching, ravaged, a proliferating gallery of women, terraced in my head as I sleep, and my own curious eye: steering toward what it perceives, capturing exact duplicates of each stylized eye I run by, as I race to comprehend what I'm taking in, what expression I'd see if I raised the mirror to find my own eye, distorted and floating above an iron cheek.

Winter advances leaving its white tracks bounding over the hills I climb each December to get to the river where velvety shrews, voles and squirrels crisscross in the snow, their claw marks reminding me of the exquisitely complicated pattern I watched an Ojibwe bite into a birchbark. (Art as old as the world, the woman said to me.) • In the origin myth of Eskimos the first children sprouted from fertile soil and, like tender plants, stayed rooted there, being nourished by the earth. No one knows how one boy and one girl grew into adults able to walk into the world, able to meet and marry. • Each tree was a letter once. Pagans spelled out their secrets by threading the proper leaves in proper order— Birch tree, Heather leaf, leaf of the Ash. A language you could hold in your hand. Words that quivered, turned color in the fall, that could be taken back, burned in regret. Lonely winters when there was nothing to say. • From a north window, the choked river, a slippery crack of light. Does my neighbor notice me crouched down, my bare fingers exploring the deer tracks I've found, some chips in the ice? I wave once, but she stares absentmindedly into the cold. Pure imitation. The great bored glacier of her face. • How many have known the endless emptiness inside an ordered room? How many, a silence so profound, inside and out? • I turn, startled, as if someone dogged my steps. Nothing. Midday sun scatters down among sapling ash. At my feet, birdtracks wherever I look. The only ciphers of the day. My footprints merge with the ones laid down here, my whole body, heart, lung, muscle, leaving its trace. • Everything that moves leaves a story. No story can exist by itself. • What am I to the wolf and the rabbit and the fox? To the songless birds balancing on branches? To the solitary pines dipped in frost? • First the trough where it plowed forward, then the wide belly-slide down the bank, the musty scent-post, the scat, the smooth hole where the otter slipped through a window in the ice. Scattered all around, a wolverine's fresh tracks, the slashes where its claws raked as it slid to a stop. Stiff gusts of wind kick up around me. Twigs and bits of debris soon mar the tracks. Before long, the sharp edges will begin to slump. By early next week, everything will be erased, the immaculate snow unable to keep the shape of a single creature.

Does Chang feel his teeth falling out? One... two... three... His mouth shuts. How will he speak? Like the moon released at last and speechless, he has lost his descendants. Life splits— a rift, a cleft, the half- light between waking and sleeping. A quartz-colored dawn rescues him. The day clears. Dizzy waves rush to shore. The factory calls him to work, but even there, the gap-toothed partitions in the wall where the rice bowls are kept stay empty. It’s another sad round of layoffs. How many more will be lost? How many?