Author: Kat Couch

Email: vyvyan@ultralightimages.co

Herbarium

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The Yellowstone Supervolcano,
a giant magma chamber
below a caldera more or less
in the middle of the national park,
if it erupts,
would cover about a third of the U.S.
in a layer of ash, thick enough in parts
that plants would die,
fields become sterile,
the waterways of the Midwest poisoned.

The cold ash and not the hot lava
does the damage.
The Earth would cool,
skies get dark in day,
mass evacuation,
millions starving.

In a worst case it would be
what scientists call
an extinction level event.
But that’s the worst case:
it may never happen in our lifetimes
nor in the lives of our grandchildren.

Still, I crack open
the canvas spine of my herbarium,
position a piece of honeysuckle,
pressed for a month,
and with a thin knife
lift a leaf, run the ball of a finger
across the wires of veins,
across each pistil thread,
infinitely patient, infinitely fragile.

Mother Ann Lee herself survived
New England’s Dark Day.
I suspect the flower has heard
that old saw of hers:
to do all your work
as though you had a thousand years to live
and as you would if you knew
you would die tomorrow.

I May Have Left the Lights On

~ Kat Couch ~ 3 Comments

I may have left the lights on
in the workshop a few years back:
eight racks of glaring bare-bulbed fluorescent lights,
and as a result,
a flock of migrating geese,
navigating the rural dark of northern Colorado,
got confused,
fell out of the sky,
and hit the windshield of a Walmart truck
making a last-minute delivery of Christmas toys,
forcing the driver to swerve
into a ditch right off the frontage road
of the interstate.

He wasn’t badly hurt,
but most of the freight was a write-off
and the store never got the hip-hop penguin
that did the street dance waddle,
so when Karl Macklemore showed up,
who’d left it too late to get the one toy
his daughter wanted
(go to Walmart, his wife said,
everything else’ll be closed),
he found only empty shelves where
Pop & Lock Penguin should have been.

There was an argument when he got home.
Hard things were said,
things you couldn’t take back.
That’s it! I’m outta here, Karl said,
and he really left this time,
left the wife and his little girl Judy.

There were tears,
the worst Christmas morning ever.
But that was just the start:
on one salary, mom working shifts,
Judy missed more than a few days of classes
doing chores.
The school sent letters —
she was getting behind,
so Uncle Craig the engineer,
who lived just over in Galt and was retired,
said, I’ll teach the girl.

They met at Starbucks most afternoons
and did pretty well,
but Judy hated History,
she sneered at Social Studies,
fidgeted through French,
until Craig said okay,
I’m not much good at this stuff anyway.
Why don’t you come on out to the shed back home.
I’ll teach you how to solder.
You’re good at math and algebra.
We’ll kick around some schematic diagrams
and maybe we can work up something
for the county science fair.

She thought about the project for three weeks,
until seeing geese one night passing
in front of the moon —
a dark V and then nothing,
a dark V and then nothing,
she proposed this:
why don’t we wire the solenoid
so that when deer mice all over the world
breathe out
the change in air pressure
registers on this sensor here,
releasing the core,
and when barn owls move their eyes in sleep,
when prairie dogs jump and stretch,
all that vibration shakes the earth enough
that it trips the switch
and cycles the lights
on and off automatically.

And Uncle Craig thought for a moment
and said, that’s impossible.
Unless you calibrate the coil to account
for the minute shift in the geomagnetic field
when black bears dig at roots,
and then you know,
it just might work.

The day my nephew got back from the science fair,
a little depressed,
we asked him how it went.
He said, Okay I guess.
I didn’t win a prize.
It was that Judy with the green eyes,
inventor of the sudoSwitch.
We said, Who’s she?

He said:
She’s bat’s darling,
cousin of the winter wheat,
Spear of Science, Javelin Judy
with the jade-green eyes,
She-Who-Harvests-Stars,
called Watcher-of-Geese,
the moon’s electrician,
house god of the deer mouse,
the one who dances on the back
of ignorance
making the sign of the sigh.
Judy, whose name rhymes
with the taste of golden currants,
the last word on the lips
of den-bound foxes
when they say fox prayers,
whose name is the only password
in the wind-stroked shortgrass prairie;
hop-hipped hare hunter,
greyhound bitch,
inventor of the sudoSwitch.

No, I said, I would have remembered her.
So this sudoSwitch, what’s it do?

I dunno exactly, he mumbled.
They say it replaces want and fear.
It saves twenty-four megawatts of shame
each year,
makes colorful truths from white lies,
smooths crow’s feet,
corrects the camber of the wheel of the law,
autotunes the music of the spheres,
raises testosterone,
lowers the bridge of understanding between generations,
generates income, deflects
incoming insults, erects
lasting love
(but consult with a doctor
for an erection lasting more than four millennia),
deflowers virgin olive oil,
magnifies fine print, prints currency,
interrupts alternating current,
gives the sightless sight,
makes the indirect direct,
talks in pigeon-elf to elves,
and turns lights off by themselves
when you leave them on at night.

I laughed.
Good luck with that.
That’s not a problem for me, I said.

I Wake up to the Breathing of Bears

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

and one in particular,
her nose against my cheek,
as wet and deeply brown as earth,
and too far down for me to see.
She introduces me
to the warmth and nacre of her mouth,
to salmonberries and bugs,
the fallen flesh of the forest,
nurse logs in the undergrowth,
to the yellow avalanche lily.

I wake to the breathing of a bear,
kind and close,
snuffling and dripping
from the tender tunnels of her own body.
She measures me between pads as big as plates,
her own five-pointed ivory flowers,
the better to picture
my eyes and sockets,
the stripped skin of the skull.

And it is always like that:
the world, when it wakes me,
because it so loves me raw,
unwrapped of lists of things to do,
the coffee cups / the smell of fear
and productivity.

That is
the way it is
when the world wakes me up,
inflated by sleep:
it is the liminal tooth
that pops and punctures me.

Returning After Evacuating From a Wildfire, June 2012

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The clothes go back in the closet
and the cats come home
and they speak to each other,
each to the other.

The plume still rises
on the western edge
in the one hundred and four degree heat,
and the firefighters on the line,
they speak to each other
in their shorthand speech.

The thank-you signs are out
and the kids approach
with their piggy banks.
On the news at nine we take the toll
and speak to each other, each to each.

But there’s one thing
that doesn’t go away, one thing
that doesn’t curl in the heat:
when the sun wasn’t yet
a red ball in the smoke,
when we got the call
and we spoke to each other,
you and me, and took the photograph
and not the clock
and took the brooch
and not your letters in a box
tied sometime in our third
(or was it the fourth?) year
when we were younger, proud,
full of piss and vinegar:
pride enough to slay
a world of dragons,
nest or night awake,
but not this.

The smoke rose, the letters lay
like wounded partisans
whispering to each other.
Each to the other.

Valedictory

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

They say the Fern Lake fire is still burning
up around Estes Park.
It started in October in dry brush, open flame,
and then the snows of the eastern Rockies came,
but it still burns on below, Inuk fire,
too remote for hotshot crews,
and anyway it is April now —
who fights fires in early spring?

The last front dropped fourteen inches in the garden
around the new birdbath,
but memory being what it is,
full of non sequiturs
and awkward prompts that pull thoughts
where they wouldn’t choose to go,
I can’t see the birdbath, its blue supplicant bowl
piled up like a wedding cake with snow
and not see Berkeley evenings.

There was a lime tree in the back
wasn’t there?
on Dwight Way or Parker Street,
tart-green on the tongue, bittersweet —
and spaghetti dinners, a honey-skinned guitar.

But here in the foothills,
far below Fern Lake,
almost three decades gone,
I’ll wrap the snow in my arms
where it has piled up on the birdbath,
where the snow has bent
the branches of the sour cherry,
bring it melting to the kitchen,
say
so it came,
and so we came and went.

Articulate

~ Kat Couch ~ 2 Comments

I speak the way I write,
but more slowly,
sorting and disposing of
five different ways
of saying something,
while my companion,
who really
only wanted a brief chat,
ages.
He grows hair in places where
there shouldn’t be any,
where before he was bald.

And meanwhile,
the tectonic plates
of the Colorado Plateau
adjust,
dinosaur bones surface,
sea turtles and bristlecone pines
complete entire life cycles.

“How should I put this?” I say,
when a city or two has fallen
into the ocean swell.
My friend is sallow now,
his skin cool, unresponsive.

“It’s coming,” I assure him.
“Too late…too late for me,” he replies.
“Is there anything
you want me to pass along?”
I finally say.
But he is quiet,
eyes staring, mouth dry.

Sand Lily

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

If you look for them
in the pioneer cemetery
you see only the headstones
standing up in the dry grass,
like erasers,
worn on one side by the wind.

You don’t see them
until you are right on top:
in a tuft of grass,
a star of wax petals,
closer to the ground
than voles and unread diaries.

(Bingham Hill, like Hillsboro,
like Antioch and the rest,
is the earth’s own step-daughter.
The child in the ground
they carried on the Overland Trail,
although she was too sick to move.

When they got stuck in the mud,
near Laramie, Anna said
she could hear her sister coughing,
and then she was gone.
On Bingham Hill you still
have to walk on the dry
edge of the ditch.)

They bloom in spring
and early summer and then they sleep.
Their roots grow down in strings
among the dead.
Our memories have always been in sand:
on microchips and Bingham Hill.

When he took his son to the hospital
they said it was a cold.
The symptoms were so much like it.
He stayed up by the bed anyway,
and then the boy’s heart gave out
as the sky got white on the eastern plains.

It was still winter.
The sand lilies were sleeping.

Things That Are Obsolete (But That I Love)

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The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations,
like opening rain;
The New York Times obituaries,
closing it back again;
the barrier islands of North Carolina;
saying Carolina —
are we allowed
such a beautiful word?
My girl, but there are limits;
the moist mariners
on Nimitz-class machines,
Allen Ginsberg and his genes:
are we aloud?
My wife, spouse
sweet talking,
tight as she can be;
patina of a depression
era gun,
blown up in
neat sweet pixels
by the setting sun.

Copyright © 2019 Lilibug Publishing.

Decorah Eagles Webcam

~ Kat Couch ~ Leave a comment

Lacking a necessary truth we make myth:
Athena breaking from the head,
Herakles, eight months old,
strangling two snakes.
He was found playing with them
by his nurse
as though they were toys.

But the fact is
nothing is born strong.
The young are always vulnerable.
When the first eaglet appeared
it was just a pip in the egg.
One hundred thousand people watched.

The camera panned the road
by the fish hatchery.
It snowed; there was an ice storm.
The mother spread her wings.
The tree shook, the chicks walked too close.
The nest was eighty feet up.

They were too small
but their beaks grew first
and their feet, outsized,
they wrapped like quiet bombs.
They fell comically,
and if the muskrat
or the raccoon or the raven
took some comfort in that /
when the female flew from the nest
she made a sound like a flag unfurled,
a sound that strikes at the gut,
the snap of banners above a bristling
regiment.

They had their chance:
there was the height of the nest,
the two parents gone,
the helpless ball of down,
but full-fledged, the young one
will tip from the branch,
and then it is too late,
when the wind catches the first flight
feather.

Copyright © 2019 Lilibug Publishing.

11 Irregular Stanzas on Trimming Toenails

~ Kat Couch ~ 1 Comment

The first nail flies off like a seed,
a dark germ inside,
and plants itself in the sleeping grass.
Come May, a full-grown toe,
luscious and greening,
lures grackles to the cottonwood.

The second is a fractured nursery rhyme,
a plump little piggy going to market,
disfigured by a fungus.
Even the wolf crosses the street
to avoid him.

About the third
the less said the better —
a disappointment to his family.

Disney wrote the fourth,
a scimitar from the Arabian Nights,
sharp as the thing
that sets it free.

Five, Dickensian,
a washerwoman,
proud and fat.

A lawyer raised number six.
Home schooled,
she argued a case
before the Supremes
regarding the rights of toes.

Seven was a sly serial toe murderer,
the cutest of the bunch.
Motel owners remembered him
smiling,
signing the check.

Eight ate leather,
loved one hundred and fifty dollar
running shoes.

Nein, the philosopher,
famously said, “After all,
what is a toenail?”

The tenth nail,
from the big right toe,
a cruel flagship,
shoots a sliver across the lake,
the ice just off,
the geese lazy on rails
like amusement park rides.

Remember the girl who dragged herself
from the sea (who can forget her),
where the old god’s sperm roiled the water?
They say the lunatic seers of Babylon
warned us about her sister:
you, Alea,
the second apocalypse of love.