This next poem is called "My Documentarian."
And you know, it's kind of a lie that we put one person's name
on the title of a book.
Books are the products of conversations and ideas
and other readings.
And this poem was written for one of my mentors
who passed away a few years ago, the poet C.D. Wright.
And it also includes reference to quipus,
which are a recording device.
They're pieces of string that in which
knots were tied in by the Inca people
as a kind of, some folks have said,
a kind of accounting system.
Another mentor and poet and friend and visual artist,
Cecilia Vicuña, uses them in her work.
"My Documentarian."
My documentarian tunes herself to the few vowels
mouthed by common sparrows, the ticks and growls
of systems around her.
She holds her landscapes up to light,
like clicking through a view-master
to reinscribe relations between the landscape and the eye.
She grows over soil she's tasted.
She winds string through her fingers,
spools a circuit for grief.
She quipus in lieu of standard accounting practices,
takes care to be noncompliant.
She file folders, fields forest and blur.
Data falls like ash around her.
She records, too, a hand on a doorknob, light on the lawn.
My documentarian pulls a thread, knots unloosen in her.
For years, no water ran in the riverbed.
Still, we called it river.
She ponders these betrayals, remembers
the brain is built on analogy, on smears and turns.
A mail truck drives past her house, and she feels her debts.
My documentarian tilts the page away
from spreadsheet towards police binders and microfiche, coffee
and billboard prayers.
Her archive scrolls, like a time lapsed sunset,
sings like a jar of breath.
A tree in her yard throws lines of sun barb and shade
just to her porch steps.
Her poems extend.