Pollen: An Ode

for Kathe

The body against death and all terror.

Richard Rhodes

Beneath Tuzigoot, the visible ruins of an ancient people—dun walls half-fallen, sunlit, cupping the outlines of rooms—we were all morning shadow and stipple cool.

Waves of sound in Tavasci Marsh. The calls and songs of territory and courtship. Red-winged blackbird—rondelet. Northern flicker—wakkawakka wakka. Common yellowthroat—witchety witchety witchety. The sun behind a desert rise, the sky blue with cirrus that seemed to disappear within all that light. Sap rising in the cottonwoods, the leaves wind-grazed. Filling the marsh, cattails in erectile masses so phallic someone might have made a joke, but the birds landed on them, wings out, then drawn in for perch, and the water looked cool enough to slip into and drink for a long, long time.

The recordist told the birders, "The marsh is beautiful this morning, all sexed up, the birds talking love."

"At some point," a friend had said, "you can't explain anymore."

Five years now since that April I drove from Kansas to Arizona for the birding festival, and I've explained hardly anything to the woman I had abandoned that same month. Is this cowardice? Or is explanation moot?

You know, all the usual darknesses: lies for years, blossoms for years, bodies I thought of for years, one I touched twice—a kiss, a fuck—obsession's near culmination and my rebuke of myself, done with that, done with that, be happy with, set yourself aside, happy to be who others needed you to be. Who or whom? The private grammar reprised in how many lives?

Now an April morning where I live in a mountain valley, now my lover who saved me in that spring I left. We're in bed reading while pollen scrims the air, and birdsong—meadowlark and song sparrow—pings and slips in the air, beautiful, yes, all sexed up.

The recordist told us that the marsh was not bucolic, it was tense and frenetic, the marsh was very, very hungry. I liked the smile he gave, the stretch of tan cheeks into charming wrinkles, a quick smile that forgot how others—a company, some government workers—had done things that nearly destroyed this marsh, the only one in Arizona free of cattle.

He lifted his head up, listening. He did this for science but also, I think, because songs declare lives as lived.

The way I looked at him was the way the marsh sounded.

The recordist knew the birds of that place so well he could identify individuals of different species by their songs. He knew them not as pictures in a field guide or generic melodies played back, but as particular presences. A certain Bullock's oriole, say, who favors a certain cottonwood. Thus, the energies of territorial defense, of courtship, of mating, of feeding, of child rearing, of predation, of dispersal were not abstracted. They were deliciously specific.

That's what I had claimed, gracelessly. But I claimed it.

Language evolves its architecture from need. So trauma comes to us essentially unaltered from the Greek, meaning "a wound," but it's the Indo European base that underlies this word and another, throe, that intrigues me. The base is ter-, "to rub, grind; cf. THROW." By the time Old English picks up the word thrawu, throe's most immediate ancestor comes to possess denotations of pain and affliction—related, my dictionary tells me, to Old Norse, thra, "strong yearning."

Well, I think, that sounds about right.

"Tuzigoot (Apache for 'crooked water') is the remnant of a Sinaguan village built between 1125 and 1400. It crowns the summit of a long ridge that rises 120 feet above the Verde Valley. The original pueblo was two stories high in places and had 77 ground-floor rooms. There were few exterior doors; entry was by way of ladders through openings in the roofs. The village began as a small cluster of rooms that were inhabited by about 50 persons for a hundred years. In the 1200s the population doubled again as refugee farmers, fleeing drought?…?settled here...