Aching for Touch

Let’s begin with a short poem:

  Uncovering Rhizomes After Neglect
  
  The yellow bearded iris hides its face.
  Not one stalk in dozens of green blades, not 
  one golden petal streaked with rust. It’s March,
  it’s rained. Elsewhere in this town, purple petals 
  crumple, spent with pollen’s trip from stamen
  to pistil. Bed after bed as bawdy 
  as bordellos. It’s not modesty
  that blankets my own, but the red oak’s
  generosity, beneath which rhizomes lie
  like aging fingers aching for the touch 
  of light. I tuck my black rake, an octave wide,
  between them to the blackbird’s song   y tú,
  y tú. A small gray moth, its sleep disturbed, 
  rises from the leaf pile in a blur of wings. 

    Cindy Huyser
    Cartography (3: A Taos Press 2025)

Austin poet Cindy Huyser is a master of the closely observed moment. From the prize-winning power plant poems of Burning Number Five to the pages of Cartography, examining a landscape mapped by grief, Huyser all but disappears into the act of seeing. Poet and landscape, poet and moment, become one. Consider “Uncovering Rhizomes After Neglect”—fourteen lines, an unrhymed sonnet, a world revealed in the space of 140 syllables.

From the outset, words as simple as bearded and face acknowledge kinship between the poet and the iris she observes, between human life and plant life, vigorous with sexual energy, “bed after bed as bawdy / as bordellos.” And then this: “rhizomes lie / like aging fingers aching for the touch / of light.” I’ve been reading Cindy Huyser’s poems for thirty years, and I’m still surprised by the lightness of her touch, by how longing—in rhizomes, in us—appears quick as a brushstroke before the poem moves on. To my favorite surprise, birdsong translated—y tú, y tú—another touch of human longing: and you, and you.

I used to say that a Shakespearean sonnet—the hypnotic cadence of iambs, the musicality of rhyme—encapsulated the entire Elizabethan worldview in fourteen lines. “Uncovering Rhizomes After Neglect” arrives some four centuries later, fresh as a woman’s brief time wielding a rake in her yard. The poet breathes in these lines. Her life is here. And the world she inhabits.

Mea Culpa

My blog posts are scheduled for the first and third Friday of each month. This one arrives on the second Friday. Last week, my good friend Tina Carlson and I drove from Albuquerque to Ada, Oklahoma, for the Scissortail Literary Festival, a yearly highpoint for participating writers.

About the Author

Cartography is new from 3: A Taos Press. Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems was co-winner of the 2014 Blue Horse Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. Cindy Huyser co-edited Bearing the Mask: Southwestern Persona Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2016) with Scott Wiggerman and has collaborated with Dos Gatos Press and Kallisto-Gaia Press as an editor for the Texas Poetry Calendar (2009-2014 and 2019 editions). Huyser has an MFA in Writing (poetry) from Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Cartography is available here ⇒

Burning Number Five: Power Plant Poems is available here ⇒