The traditional Japanese calendar relied on the division of a year into
72 microseasons that marked seasonal variations and subtle transitions
in the natural world. The 24 main divisions, sekki, are split again into three
kō, with each kō lasting about five days. With names such as "Hibernating
Insects Surface,” “First Peach Blossoms,” and “Rainbows Hide,” the calendar
begins in early February, and marks a total of 72 kō.
Inspired by the idea of paying close attention to the microseasons in one's
own landscape, the microessay selections within this essay are set within
the Sonoran Desert. They are first titled with the kō of the Japanese calendar
that correspond to those same days of the Gregorian calendar year.
East Wind Melts the Ice / Owls Descend
They had been coming for a while, but she only heard them when she was awake at night, their velvet syllables floating back and forth between the towering Aleppo pines that towered sixty feet from the ground. She’d leave a flashlight by the door so she could slip out and look for them.
“The reason owls are nearly silent in flight,” her ornithologist friend had explained, “is because the edges of their feathers can dishevel sound waves.” He was right; roosting or flying, her flashlight never found them.
Until one night, like casual visitors stopping in for a cocktail, they appeared on the telephone pole in the alley just behind the backyard. Two great horned owls. If poems were birds, she thought, this is what they’d look like having a conversation. Where silence is a part of what sounds.
Suddenly she feels afraid that maybe she won’t hear them anymore, that perhaps their sudden appearance means they will be moving on. That she will be alone with her whirring thoughts instead of barefoot in the neighborhood at 3 a.m., breathing hard, trying to find them.
~
Hibernating Insects Surface / Echoes in Nesting Season
The children find a nest on their walk that has fallen from the branches of a mesquite tree.
The doorbell, which has been improperly wired, keeps ringing when no one is there.
~
First Peach Blossom / Wildflowers Emerge
Her favorite list essay in Sei Shōnagon’s Pillow Book is the one titled “Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster.” Even though it was written over a thousand years ago, she finds the list moving and relatable. “To notice that one’s elegant Chinese mirror has become a little cloudy,” Shōnagon writes. “Sparrows feeding their young.”
She thinks of this list when she notices one evening that the wildflowers have returned with their riotous colors. Seeds kicking open after sleeping all this time inside the earth. The shuddering golds of Mexican poppies, the fragile pinks of desert evening primrose. What makes her heart beat faster is thinking of the ticking of their tiny, hidden clocks—all around her, invisible bells tolling: wake up, unfurl, regrow. She steps with care among them, those pigment-stained petals, those hundreds of living cathedrals.
~
Sparrows Start to Nest / Citrus Starts to Bloom
The children decide to make their own perfume by crushing citrus blossoms in the mortar. Waxy purples in the lemon. Ivories in the grapefruit and tangerine. They mix their potions carefully, then jam them into tiny vials with small cork stoppers. Montale knew: lemons are vials of memory light.
The air is so heavy with scent, she wants to put it on a plate and eat it. Slice its thick perfume apart with a fork and knife like a dense piece of cake. She knows, months from now, cardboard boxes will appear on the neighborhood’s walkways. Filled with fruit to be given away.
Then the air will be clear. The citrus heavy in the hand as doorknobs.
~
Distant Thunder / Cloudless Sulphur Butterflies Appear
She was sixteen years old at the time. Living in another country whose tropics landed much closer to the equator. She’d never seen a volcano erupt before.
Night was best for the viewing. But the mosquitoes in the marshes along the rivers were so thick she nearly inhaled them; they feasted on everyone. Even if you rubbed the bites carefully instead of scratching they’d bleed.
It was worth it to watch the sky light up in a color that can only be described as molten neon. To see, in all that darkness, rock being born. Now, when she sees the first cloudless sulphur butterfly appear, she thinks of the same kind of light, remembering. What it means to be a witness to another’s life, another new configuration arriving.
~
First Rainbows / Lizards Return
The lawn gnomes were strange companions. She preferred the gardens in the middle of their street, the ones with the giant Peruvian apple cactus and fairy duster shrubs and agaves that sprawled beneath the mesquites like languid octopuses.
But this yard had a kind of magic to it: there were glass balls filled with little colored fairy lights, a Paz sign with the word written in three different languages, ceramic fairy houses—one made from a tiny cactus instead of a mushroom. Gnomes all over.
She hadn’t noticed until this year the lizards returning. Now she sees this is a yard in which they delight. Ornate tree lizards basking on the little patios. Hidden sandy nooks with greater earless lizards peeking out, a likely spot to lay their eggs. Clearly, the set-up, arranged with such careful attention, had its own enchantment. Who was she to know what the lizards wanted? Who was she to know what they might enjoy?
~
Worms Surface / Green Oranges Fall
The clouds while driving the kids home from school: diaphanous blooms with trailing tentacles like a row of sky jellyfish. Leafing through Izumi Shikibu’s poems so many times that day she’d given herself two paper cuts. She can’t stop thinking about the invisible stains Shikibu mentions: the stain of a lover’s body, the stain of the wind. Here, the stain is the heavy smell of green things sunning themselves. Pungent. Exuberant. All the green baby oranges rolling around on the sidewalk like someone has abandoned a game of marbles. Their scent stains the tips of her fingers.
Nothing
in the world
is usual today.
This is
the first morning.
Shikibu wrote more than a thousand years ago. When she looks at the orange tree, she sees a being so full of its own bounty that it simply must let some of it go.
~
Silkworms Start Feasting on Mulberry Leaves / Night-blooming Cereus Blossoms
She notices early one morning the night-blooming cereus in her neighbor’s yard is full of dozens of wilting blossoms. Cereus are pollinated by hawk moths and only bloom at night—the blossoms look like feather dusters dipped in wax. Even the shredded memory of their fragrance is enough to make her kick off her bedsheets while still half asleep to find them.
What she finds instead are birds. Near the early morning, as soon as she opens the door, thousands of migrating songbirds. Warblers, flycatchers, hummingbirds. Hidden inside the newly leafed branches. Strange to see the world so still, yet hear it transformed by sound.
The following night, she steps out with her flashlight and finds a single mockingbird singing its heart out, its song brash against the stillness, and utterly singular: a sound of glass being struck, an old shower knob being squinched open over and over. A song as if some winged being has been caught in a net and is struggling, pleading for its life.
Why such anguish at midnight? She learns that young male mockingbirds grow desperate if they haven’t found a mate during breeding season, sometimes singing all night in a last-ditch attempt to attract one. She knows only the human words. But is it strange to feel a kind of kinship with that loneliness? To stand there in the dark and feel her body blushing in the heat of all that longing?
~
Praying Mantises Hatch / Eucalyptus Sheds its Bark
The eucalyptus has burst from its bark and its husk curls from its trunk in haphazard shreds like enormous cardboard puzzle pieces. Inside the bark, the new wood is the biting texture of alert velvet.
Her kitchen sink is overflowing with dishes. Laundry is piled in heaps on the bed. But right now, she’s thinking about the way they celebrated Tsukumi—the autumn moon viewing festival—with her friend’s family by climbing up into the eucalyptus’s treehouse. Eating the round, pale dumplings and watching the paper balloon moon rise in the midst of scent-heavy branches. How do different beings experience moonlight? She wonders, leans the length of her body against the new shining wood, this shinbone of a giant.
~
Irises Bloom / Stick Insects Hatch
Neon floats tossed into the pool, one fuchsia, one tangerine. The pool water pristine, the detritus of yesterday’s monsoon storm—pine needles, citrus leaves—chewed away by the industrious pool sucker. When she sees the baby walking stick insect fall in, she scoops it in her hands, the little scribbly legs make her flinch. Phasmatodea, derived from the Ancient Greek φάσμα meaning ‘phantom” for the way they slip into the realm of the botanical yet remain animals. And who doesn’t love that kind of secret? Those pieces of the world that slide so easily between one thing and another?
Despite the evocative name, a walking stick is not exactly a charismatic creature. And yet, there was a kind of fascination as the children paddled over and they watched it preen off water at the pool’s edge. How it took its time, stretching its limbs one by one to slick off the offensive droplets. Carefully, tenderly, each limb scarcely the diameter of a single human hair. Three sets of eyes on a leggy insect, fingers clamped on the pool edge. It was so very hot they had to squint in the sparkle of the pool’s water against the ledge where it perched, looking well, more or less like a baby stick, and they all laughed when the last drops scattered—how it had preened its face like a cat.
~
Warm Winds Blow / Grackles Chatter
Great-tailed grackles tucked inside the twenty-foot hedges that skirt the wash. Their rusty-gate-hinge calls are deafening. Foliage so thick you can’t see the birds—it’s as if the bushes themselves are speaking.
It’s scorching, so she walks before sunrise. Waters the baby mesquite trees at the poet’s house because the poet is traveling. When she moves the hose, she sees a poem the poet has chalked across the garage.
Under the corpulent clouds
I feed the birds
of my failures,
so tenderly!
—Erika L. Sánchez
The rainbow that afternoon is enormous.
~
Great Rains Sometimes Fall / Desert Tortoises Migrate
In the mid-scorch of summer, the tortoises emerge from their burrows and begin to forage. Lost tortoises are everywhere.
Her daughter finds one in their front yard, and three different people come to their house thinking it might be theirs. It isn’t, but one of the three—hoping someone will do the same for their lost tortoise—adopts it anyway.
~
Cool Winds Blow / Figeater Beetles Swarm
It’s monsoon season, air thick with moisture, sterile thunder thumping in the distance but not yet loosening its rain. Scattered in the fine dirt around the prickly pear cactus, the green iridescent bodies of figeater beetles. Among them, little mutilated cradles of hollowed-out prickly pear fruit.
They mate in throngs, lay eggs, and perish. The baby grubs winding their sleep around the dry haze of rattling leaves, around the death scrabbles of their parents, those heavy emeralds thudding the dust.
How strange and how familiar to happen upon beginnings and endings in a single space. Fecundity and death meeting like old friends in a summer house where, arm in arm, they quietly walk about, admiring the furniture.
~
Evening Cicadas Sing / Pieridae Butterflies Appear
Through the grime of her windshield, she watches a single yellow butterfly swerve across all four lanes of traffic. Holds her breath.
“All creatures are already dead when they live,” she reads in an essay she stumbles upon while researching the heaviness of Kōbō Abe’s language, his wary observations of sand and insects. “Some creatures like butterflies,” Abe writes, “are more dead than others.” Is that what captivates her? To be near another body that is so close to the end yet not in pain?
They’d arrived in a gust that past week, but only, she noticed, in citrus shades—fluttering lemons and buoyant tangerines. A shudder of confetti tasting the world with its feet. That their lives would be released was inevitable. The way her son only fell asleep when holding her hair.
~
Heat Starts to Die Down / Canyon Tree Frogs Emerge
Here’s a story she remembers from her childhood: a samurai takes a brief nap beneath an ancient cedar and dreams his way into another world: welcomed into a lush palatial estate, he’s soon invited to wed the August Princess, who bears him seven children. Twenty-four years idyllic pass, his wife falls gravely ill and dies; he’s told by royal messenger he is to be sent back home and wakes to find himself still beneath the cedar only moments after he’d fallen asleep.
Yet when he looks around, he finds a colony of ants, their intricate structures of straw
and clay oddly familiar. Why, there is the palace, he exclaims, begins to search across the tree root for the mountain of Hanryōkō, the grave of his dead princess. Finds, embedded in clay and tucked beneath a pebble shaped like a Buddhist monument—the body of a dead female ant.
When the canyon treefrogs emerge, it’s that story she thinks of as she watches the schoolchildren handle them so carelessly. Some no larger than her smallest fingernail. Don’t you know? She thinks. That one is a great poet, the other has just joined the opera, the one by the bike path is a student of the moon’s.
~
Dew Glistens White on Grass / Black Widows Start to Nest
That September, she learns that after the monsoons black widows proliferate. She finds the first one in her mailbox—feels the strands of sticky web, hears it rip as she pulls out her hand. The spider is the glassy black of chilled lava. Climbs toward her so nimbly she shrieks.
Two days later, she finds one on the backyard fencepost, another beneath the seat of her daughter’s bike. After that, three spherical, papery egg sacs, suspended like fingernail-sized Noguchi lamps on the gate at her daughter’s school. She collects them with a stick and crushes them underfoot.
But once home, she remembers the first story she ever read of Tanizaki’s. About the woman who gets the spider tattooed across her skin. She digs out the book and reads it again. “Little by little the tattoo marks began to take on the form of a huge black widow spider and by the time the night sky was paling into dawn this weird, malevolent creature had stretched its eight legs to embrace the whole of the girl’s back.” The woman—a timid geisha—is transformed when the tattoo is complete. Triumphant, dazzling, deadly, her “old fears have been swept away.”
When does otherness turn to wonder? How is a story a door? That she begins to think of them as sisters feels salacious, a juicy secret. That she starts to delight in finding their untidy, disheveled, “tangle webs.” Did you know? Black widows have thousands of slit sensilla embedded in their exoskeletons; each helps the spider sense vibrations, changes shape to tune the frequencies that echo in her web.
~
Swallows Leave / Summer Evening Nocturnes Begin
She loves her friend’s poem, where she bikes to the 7-Eleven at sunset because sometimes,
when the clouds part, she could catch a glimpse of Mt. Fuji.
That morning, her son had stood in front of the science museum, a human sundial. In the evening, Mexican free-tailed bats appeared in the blank sky above the park, dozens of them swooping and diving, snapping through clouds of insects that arrived with the rains.
Native fireflies in Arizona are elusive, so all afternoon she and her son had drawn fireflies on glow-in-the-dark paper and pasted them on the wall next to his bed. But it took the darkness
to make them glow.
~
Insects Hole Up Underground / Leafcutters Feasting
The title of the five-day kō makes her walk outside to the part of the yard where she knows she’ll find the desert leafcutters. Their underground nests can have hundreds of chambers—nurseries, garbage compartments, fungus gardens.
In the hotter months, their trails are invisible. Leafcutter ants forage in the quiet of night when the soil is cool. But the rain sage has bloomed, and now she traces the petals to their nests. It means something to see their trails loop and collide with one another, to stand still enough that she becomes implicated in their paths. She watches stragglers with their flowers held aloft like sails.
Between the prickly pear and century plant, she finds one entrance. Smeared with blossoms, a lavender corona spilled into the dirt.
~
Rainbows Hide / Frost Appears
The museum docent has a cross-section of a saguaro cactus—he holds it up to the children to show them the saguaro’s ribs. “From an early age,” he says, “Tohono O’odham teach our children that they must not throw rocks or harm the saguaro when harvesting their fruit. Saguaros,” he explains, “are people.”
She’s driven through the Sonoran Desert to the field station in the early morning when frost still lines the desert plants. She remembers how when the sun rose, each saguaro was etched in silver. They ached alive.
~
Deer Shed Antlers / Small Night Rains Begin
The small rain falls over her insomnia hours. She keeps her face up but closes her eyes; it treads the roof like young javelina. Her daughter had foot surgery months ago; the bone graft they used has finally begun to heal. That day she received a letter from the donor’s mother: the fragment of bone they’d used in the surgery had been a section of wrist bone from her son. Her son, the letter had told her, who loved to run, went into sudden cardiac arrest and died in front of his mother before reaching the floor.
Her daughter was at the pool when she opened the envelope. She sat very still at first, holding it between her fingers. Then something inside her grew white hot and she put her forehead against the table. She wouldn’t call what she did then crying. It felt like sound was being torn out of her, the way one would tear pages from a book.
The patterning of rain is eventually folded into her sleep, and when she wakes and steps out into the morning with its smell of damp creosote and slaked earth, the sense memories of dozens of desert-rain mornings crowd inside of her. Each is grafted to the next, each belongs as much as the other. Now when she rubs her daughter’s foot with ointment, she thinks about that other mother, that other son.
~
Springs Thaw / Wind Breaks Branches
Here’s what the wind has smeared: acacia pollen, the feathers of a Gila woodpecker,
the carmine fruit of the prickly pear. Here’s what the wind has broken: the branch of the hundred-year-old palo verde tree, the mourning dove nest.
What has she learned? The world is speaking, all the time, that much she is certain of.
What she hadn’t considered, what she knows now with equal certainty, is that the world
is listening to her, too.
~
Ice Thickens on Streams / Snowflakes Drift
Snow in the desert is a dream, a mirage. The children stop everything, run barefoot out into the yard, hands up, spinning. Leaping among aloes.
There is no defter feather. It melts momentarily. Falls so quietly it reminds her of Bashō. “Real poetry is to lead a beautiful life. To live poetry is better than to write it.” All begins to blur. Snow falling into abandoned nests. Snow falling like the trees require a blanket.
The doves, stunned by these chilled feathers, retreat. She sees their black eyes inside the branches, prescient, unblinking. Memory is a palimpsest, didn’t you know?
What is out there is the whole world. Being erased. Reborn.
KATHERINE LARSON is a poet, essayist, and biologist by training. Her debut collection of poems, Radial Symmetry, was selected by Louise Glück as winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, she has been published in numerous literary journals including Poetry, Orion, and AGNI. Larson is active with organizations and artists dedicated to conservation and environmental education in the Upper Gulf of California. She lives with her family in Arizona.
