Author: Dana Henry Martin

Intellectual Surplus

Poets, may I rise from the beautiful destruction of your work. May I live another life, another day, through your poems. Grant me the strength to be burned clean and fly like that fierce mythical bird or even to outlive ten phoenixes like one of the Nymphs—all because of your writing. May we rise through and because of each other. May that be our eternity.

I just clocked fifty-nine active zone minutes on Fitbit getting IKEA items out of their packaging.

A bobcat just walked by our house.

Now I know what my monsoon-season hair looks like. Not good.

I’m dressed like a flower so the bee who made his way into our home yesterday will land on me and I can walk him outside. I made nectar for him last night and placed it in a shallow dish. His name is Tucson but we call him Tuckie for short.

Don’t thank me for helping you grow if you grew at my expense.

There is no border in the heart.

I’ve got a lot going on here in Southern Arizona for a person who was intellectual surplus in Southern Utah.

I was desperate to exist in Southern Utah and am relieved that my existence is a given in Southern Arizona.

Tell me where you live without telling me where you live: I wake at 5 a.m. to be active while avoiding the heat, have a favorite saguaro that I photograph regularly, and nurture a love/hate relationship with javalinas.

I just received a box containing a box containing boxes.

Love: Why do I feel so heavy?

Me: Because you’re carrying me.

The longer we live, the longer we live in the past.

You won’t save the land. (You must try to save the land.) You won’t save the animals. (You must try to save the animals.) You won’t save humans. (You must try to save humans.) Who is speaking? (And to whom?) My trauma to me. (Me to my trauma.) Me to myself. (My trauma to my trauma.)

I was of the lands in Southern Oklahoma. I’ve been in all the other lands where I’ve lived, not of them. I could be of Southern Arizona someday — if I stay long enough, if I live long enough. I want to be of lands again. It’s been too long. It’s been decades.

My dog and I eat spinach together on the anniversary of my last dog’s death.

Palo Verde Beetle

A palo verde beetle emerged from the ground today by digging up through the insulation on the perimeter of our Arizona room’s slab. They emerge when monsoon season starts, triggered by the heat and humidity. This one needed to make her way outside, so I let her get oriented for a few hours then gave her a lift on a dustpan. She was very accommodating. I have a photo of her, but it’s not flattering, so I won’t share it.

Dreams

I dreamed I was a mattress. A thin, hard mattress. I was also me. I sat on myself. Human me was uncomfortable with mattress me. Mattress me was uncomfortable with human me. Mattress me stood up. Human me fell to the ground, hard.

I dreamed my siblings were going to put me in an institution, get power of attorney over me, and use that power to steal my money slowly, discreetly, over many years until my death, the way my father did with his oil-rich aunt in Oklahoma.

The other dreams were just darkness but not the scary kind. The kind like floating in black water in the middle of the night in a silty lake you know doesn’t have water mocassins in it. Peaceful like that, as peaceful as things get in my sleeping and waking worlds.

Baby Zebras

I dreamed Jon died. I mourned for two years. Then I saw an ad for an AI dream companion. It was like a life partner, only not real and only around while someone was dreaming. The idea was that if you had a partner while you were sleeping, you’d feel happier and more fulfilled while you were awake. Also, people were having dream sex with their companions. But that’s not why I wanted mine. I got the companion so they could bring me a baby zebra every night, one I could care for and play with.

My companion didn’t let me down. I had the baby zebra, and I was transformed. I loved the baby zebra. My dog, Lexi, loved the baby zebra. We’d see black-and-white stripes run past the windows at the beginning of a dream and know the baby zebra was in the yard. My waking life was beautiful because my sleeping life was all baby zebra, all the time.

One day, after another two years had passed, the doorbell rang. It was Jon.

I’m alive again, he said.

I didn’t ask why. It was just a fact. There he was, alive. I felt elated until I thought about losing the baby zebra.

I tried to hide the baby zebra from him at first, but he could tell I was different, happy. He took this personally. I finally told him about the AI companion and the baby zebra and how much Lexi and I loved and needed the baby zebra. The look of sadness on his face was beyond description. He was inconsolable, as was I. It was a feeling I hadn’t experienced since the baby zebra came into my life.

Maybe I can get you a baby zebra, he said, knowing he couldn’t.

Maybe you can, I said, knowing he couldn’t.

Almost Land, Almost Air

We don’t have to be Sisyphus, pushing a rock up a hill forever. We don’t have to be Demosthenes, speaking with pebbles in our mouth.

Half the time, these doves fly wherever they want. The other half, they fly away from danger.

It’s warm today. Too warm for worries.

I sort everything for the move. A box for hate. A box for love. A box for confusion. A box for pain. In the end, everything’s in one box: the box of love. It’s overflowing.

If we can see ourselves in literature, we can see ourselves in the world.

You feel almost human, Tucson, just like your stately Saguaro. Or maybe I feel almost land, almost air, almost bird, almost snake, almost you, Tucson.

I dreamed my mother had a car that was also a dishwasher and an ashtray. If it had been a wet bar, a bassinet, and a coffin, too, she would have had a cradle-to-grave device.

Want is the first word I felt with my whole being. Want want want want want clattered through my nerves making sense of physical phenomena that can only be conceptualized through language. It’s never left, that word, not since I learned there was a name for what moves me, what makes me ache, what blinds me to reason and reveals me for what I am at my core: a thing that craves.

Sometimes, you’ve just got to superglue your cracked and bloodied feet and keep walking.

Sometimes all it takes is a neighbor reaching out with an armful of peaches to save us from disaster.

My neighbor appears to be pushing a stroller full of snacks down the trail. No child. No dog. Just snacks. Brilliant.

May winds blow birds your way.

It’s the time of year in which I worry ceaselessly about baby birds.

My dog is in the kitchen staring at the air fryer.

Ravens overhead and a pile of entrails on my back patio.

Catastrophic thinking: The tip of an agave spine is lodged in my finger. I’m obviously going to have to cut my whole hand off.

Walking with Cavafy

Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong / and my heart lies buried like something dead. / How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?

Windy night. Windy morning. Tumbleweeds congregate in my yard like churchgoers who stick with their own kind and bristle at anything unlike them.

Wherever I turn, wherever I look, / I see the black ruins of my life, here, / where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.

I walk from one tumbleweed to the next literally sizing them up. I want a fat one, nice and round, no thorns. I find one I like and carry it high like a torch to my back door. I imagine I’m carrying justice or truth, though it’s just a dead amaranth and I’m just a person living in Toquerville, Utah, trying to make sense of this place before I leave it.

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. / This city will always pursue you.

This is not a city, I think. Not in any real sense. Eighteen hundred people live in this town named after a Paiute Chief who may not have existed. He makes a nice story, though, one of Native Americans and Mormon pioneers living in harmony, so the locals are sticking to it. There are probably as many cows and chickens as humans here. Six cloned while bulls live up on the hill. Two Shetland ponies reside down the street. More than anything, this place is comprised of sandy soils, so many types they each have a name — alfisols, aridsols, entisols, mollisols — not like the basalt, which is just called basalt. Chief Toquer was named after that basalt, so the story goes.

You’ll walk the same streets, grow old / in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses. / You’ll always end up in this city.

The tumbleweed will stay on my coffee table until I get on the road to Tucson, where I’ll display it as a reminder of the place I’ve left. Well, mostly left. We never leave the places we leave. Didn’t Cavafy say as much in his poem “The City”?

Don’t hope for things elsewhere: / there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.

But I have hope. Those of us who despair must also hope. It’s like a teeter-totter, but with great effort you can sit closer to the fulcrum and find balance. Hope isn’t a thing with feathers. It’s a tumbleweed trying to spread its seeds as far as possible even after it’s dead. I have that kind of hope, one that moves with me and urges me to move. Movement is breath, is heartbeat. I especially love those slabs of highway that make the car go “ga-dung, ga-dung, ga-dung” the way my heart does when I know I’m alive. The roads between here and Tucson undulate like a roller coaster meant for children. They make me nauseated, which is another way of knowing I’m alive, an old way of knowing, a way I may cast off one day as I tumble along.

Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, / you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Then I might as well go anywhere I want, Cavafy. Why relegate myself to this small corner? Why do here what I could do in wilder lands with deeper histories? Where admission is possible and millions of saguaros throw up their arms to welcome the beloved wrecked and wretched with perfect equanimity.

—

The text in italics is from “The City,” by C P. Cavafy.

Conversation with Cavafy

Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong / and my heart lies buried like something dead. / How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?

Windy night. Windy morning. Tumbleweeds congregate in my yard like churchgoers who stick with their own kind and bristle at anything unlike them.

Wherever I turn, wherever I look, / I see the black ruins of my life, here, / where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.

I walk from one tumbleweed to the next literally sizing them up. I want a fat one, nice and round, no thorns. I find one I like and carry it high like a torch to my back door. I imagine I’m carrying justice or truth, though it’s just a dead amaranth and I’m just a person living in Toquerville, Utah, trying to make sense of this place before I leave it.

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. / This city will always pursue you.

This is not a city, I think. Not in any real sense. Eighteen hundred people live in this town named after a Paiute Chief who may not have existed. He makes a nice story, though, one of Native Americans and Mormon pioneers living in harmony, so the locals are sticking to it. There are probably as many cows and chickens as humans here. Six cloned while bulls live up on the hill. Two Shetland ponies reside down the street. More than anything, this place is comprised of sandy soils, so many types they each have a name — alfisols, aridsols, entisols, mollisols — not like the basalt, which is just called basalt. Chief Toquer was named after that basalt, so the story goes.

You’ll walk the same streets, grow old / in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses. / You’ll always end up in this city.

The tumbleweed will stay on my coffee table until I get on the road to Tucson, where I’ll display it as a reminder of the place I’ve left. Well, mostly left. We never leave the places we leave. Didn’t Cavafy say as much in his poem “The City”?

Don’t hope for things elsewhere: / there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.

But I have hope. Those of us who despair must also hope. It’s like a teeter-totter, but with great effort you can sit closer to the fulcrum and find balance. Hope isn’t a thing with feathers. It’s a tumbleweed trying to spread its seeds as far as possible even after it’s dead. I have that kind of hope, one that moves with me and urges me to move. Movement is breath, is heartbeat. I especially love those slabs of highway that make the car go “ga-dung, ga-dung, ga-dung” the way my heart does when I know I’m alive. The roads between here and Tucson undulate like a roller coaster meant for children. They make me nauseated, which is another way of knowing I’m alive, an old way of knowing, a way I may cast off one day as I tumble along.

Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner, / you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Then I might as well go anywhere I want, Cavafy. Why relegate myself to this small corner? Why do here what I could do in wilder lands with deeper histories? Where admission is possible and millions of saguaros throw up their arms to welcome the beloved wrecked and wretched with perfect equanimity.

Rustle and Racket

My husband doesn’t like saguaros. I felt an immediate connection with them. They’re columns of water, not unlike humans. They store what they need so they can survive dry times, deadly times.

Their arms are few or many or long or short or tangled and twisted. One is called Shiva by locals who check in on her and wish her well. She’s as beloved as the wild mustang colt at Salt River who the locals have also named.

Sometimes saguaros grow up and through palo verde trees. Sometimes their arms grow into each other. That’s when they look like they’re dancing or embracing or holding up one of their own who would otherwise fall.

Human, human. Impossibly human. More human than humans, perhaps.

Imagine walking around with woody nests in your hair, the rustle and racket of fledgling crested caracaras who see you before they see much else.

Imagine white blooms erupting from your crown every day for a month before the heat comes, the dry heat, with its days as monotonous as the desert you live in appears, at least at first glance.

Imagine howling nights. Imagine remaining so silent and still some see you as a spiritual teacher, your pleated roots ready to expand for water and more water and more water.

Impossibly Human

My husband doesn’t like saguaros. I felt an immediate connection with them. They’re columns of water, not unlike humans. They store what they need so they can survive dry times, deadly times.

Their arms are few or many or long or short or tangled and twisted. One is called Shiva by locals who check in on her and wish her well. She’s as beloved as the wild mustang colt at Salt River who the locals have also named.

Sometimes saguaros grow up and through Palo Verde trees. Sometimes their arms grow into each other. That’s when they look like they’re dancing or embracing or holding up one of their own who would otherwise fall.

Human, human. Impossibly human. More human than humans, perhaps.

Imagine walking around with woody nests in your hair, the rustle and racket of fledgling Crested Caracaras who see you before they see much else.

Imagine white blooms erupting from your crown every day for a month before the heat comes, the dry heat, with its days as monotonous as the desert you live in appears, at least at first glance.

Imagine howling nights. Imagine remaining so silent and still some see you as a spiritual teacher, your pleated roots ready to expand for water and more water and more water.

This Canyon

The problem with this canyon is that it doesn’t know it’s a canyon, so it will go on being a canyon until someone stops it from being a canyon.

This canyon has moods. Its moods can’t be contained. It’s cold wind, warm wind, hot wind. It’s the echoes of coyotes howling from the land and hawks and vultures screeching in the air. It takes on all these sounds, all this movement, without thought, without hesitation, without common sense.

We want to put this canyon in a long-term program so it can learn how to be a church lot or a fractional-ownership community. Anything but a canyon. Maybe a golf course or a shopping mall. Maybe a water park or an RV site. We need more of those. What we don’t need is more canyons.

This canyon is a burden to the taxpayer. It never gets any better at not being a canyon. We’ve tried everything we can with no luck. This canyon doesn’t listen. This canyon doesn’t learn. This canyon doesn’t stay on task. It won’t tell us its history. It doesn’t answer our questions. It just goes on and on about rivers and rocks and how it’s millions of years old, all evidence of its derangement.

We can’t help this canyon if this canyon won’t cooperate.

We don’t need any more canyons here in these canyons which are always annoyingly so canyonlike. Canyons should be outlawed. They should be jailed. They should be shocked into being what we want them to be.

This lousy canyon. This maniacal canyon. Such a waste, such a terrible waste.

—

The last sentence of this poem is from the ending of Charles Bukowski’s poem “Paper and People.”