Mohs’s Scale of Hardness, by Mike Perez
Mohs’s scale of hardness:
(Scale devised in 1812 by the German
mineralogist Friedrich Mohs, of the scratch
hardness of minerals […] The scale is linear
up to a hardness of 9 (corundum), but then rises
dramatically to 10, with diamond about 10 times
harder than corundum.
—from Oxford Dictionary of Earth Sciences
0
a sort of geo-autobiography from soft to hard:
1
talc
a johnson & johnson dawn
caress of leaves against a window
magnolia-soft wafts of powdered light that sift through frames
flowered talcum consciousness
crib of fragrant toes & fingers
billowing of summer air condensation on your upper lip
a withheld thought
that rises from your head like membranous balloons, as in a comic book
conversations whispered
écriture
of written speech imprinting like an etch-a-sketch
into your cerebellum one quick finger drawn across a text of sweaty windows
2
gypsum
playing hooky from sunday school
the sea is a bohemian
of nomadic traces & jacksonville noons, telling your future
crook of your arm, holding vitreous luster
alkaline pH
iridescent traces of beach water powdery saline evaporated
to scratches on your forearm white crystallized on coppertone
at home your mother’s nail against your truant skin draws up the
desiccated ocean pulling up the soft-sift of your punishment’s
rinsed tabulation dusted bust: you are a corporeal chalkboard of penitence
3
calcite
formed as rhombohedral prisms of rock-forming carbonate
found in shells used as fertilizer or as building-stone
solidified like stories once believed & decomposing
a charted clash of chemistries two lovers as they kiss
fizzing with virtual bicarbonate answering each other
in a dialect of isotopes litmus strips curl from their brows
reaction’s song reacted atomic mass & weight
like a central movement you have longed to get at voiced
the note of vulnerability and physics you will recognize
like jimmy scott’s castrato-wash of vibrato on a long note
wavering like hoarded pain cauterized with soul
a stretched emission from the quick that fills the moment
with a wholeness from a fractured legacy
an empty shell of hard-won hardness echoing melodic absence
the chemical promise in a kiss of structure, scaffold, calcium
of seam & seal & healing knit mouths met in unguent heat
4
fluorite
white of bonded white smile of an actor/model/waiter/writer
as he serves his millionth entrée after a bump in the restroom stall
“smile, tho your heart is aching” opiate white numb of gums
upraised tusk in elephantine rage rottweiler baring fangs
“brush-a brush-a brush-a, with the new ipana”
crest of u.s. capitalist as he bites down on a half-wrapped sandwich
with a tiny strip of tinfoil underneath his molars
5
apatite
principal constituent of fossil bones & phosphoric acid
hunger & the hunt concrete tenebrae of
homo sapiens
tibia as fable fabulist recycled fodder of ancestral mulch
carapace of fish picked clean with piranha precision
trace of paleolithic like a triglobyte’s impression like
a spiny-tailed indent of hoof compressed in georgia clay
the body’s correlative: gnaw of anorexic pang
6
orthoclase
opalescent play of colors (white w/ bluish tints, red-streaked)
manufactured porcelain pottery glazes
urn of well-wrought amazonite not the sound of one hand clapping
but the clap of venus de milo’s right hand as it hit the floor
moon-marbly parthenon of ruin
containment of art a brook of clean-cleaved rubble
earthquake of regurgitated pebbles in a crashing wave
sparkle of a tsunami before it hits a city
7
quartz
silicate rock-forming semi-precious heterogeneous colors
rose & amethyst cairngorm dark-brown shot-through streaks, like smoke
shaped like crystal prisms terminating in striated six-face pyramids
sphinxes of onyx, opal-marbled, question you:
how hard is it to quit smoking to quit gauging
a hard scale of your own of day-to-day existence
no 12-steps no plague no blinding & no incest
8
topaz
crystals are prismatic and bipyramidal
named after topazos, an island in the red sea
as adamant as naming things after
the land of canaan
hard as starting over with
agnostic nomenclature hard as naming
I was traumatized
9
corundum
two main varieties blue and green can be yellow to brown or almost black
can be basically a peacock or the nbc logo or networks in general
the shade of the jutting arabesques in Balanchine ballets
corundum’s main use: emery paper
grinding wheels & discs
powders for grinding and polishing hard as churning Marxist wheels
as memories suppressed
hard as gertrude stein tenderizing jeweled buttons
the shade of family-jeweled confrontation
the dance of who did what to whom’s refracting conversation
“a kind in a glass and a cousin” an arrangement of language, pointing
no place like home on the range where no one ever needs say
incest
almost
hard enough for you to forget the rock-in-the-rough of music:
the fertile shock of chaka khan’s adamantine wail as she yells “ain’t nobody”
“to shine:
if there is singing
then there is the resumption”
re-entry to a workplace
to an unmolested world
and where exactly
would that be
as you slowly wean yourself from hardened meaning
sea-bottle green of years of isolation cleansing you— (down the hatch the lithium goes)
redux
baby precious polishing you with your own streams of salt the verdant cut
of newness as you try to let another touch you
without staying jaded
10
diamond
glitter of an aphorism
oscar wilde’s wit times ten aesthetic lasting earnestness
much harder than charlton heston’s pecs
in “the ten commandments”
hard as ‘like or as’ perfected
gem of perpetuity
hard as organized religion
unrequited love
the ashes of a.e. housman
interred next to moses jackson’s
deep beneath a cemetery in the fields of shropshire
now transformed into an octahedral carbon pocket
also housing the transformed bodies of long-buried digby dolben
& gerard manley hopkins crystallized beneath the earth
where the ceremony takes 10, 000 years
salt to ash to
soft
to satin spar
& spur of coalescing pyroclasts
that marry molecules to tetrahedrons
“digby dolben do you take this jesuit to be your lawful wedded
& embedded husband”
in 12,001 they ossify into immortal diamonds
I’ll settle for a mortal diamond:
beau named moses:
moze:
a gay geologist
who mows the lawn & owes his lower hardnesses
to the sight of carboniferous gleam inside my eyes one may have applied science
who’d like to analyze the seismic hit
within a laying-on of hands
with one purported man of letters
(not an experiment)
words are shallow as a petri dish until we touch
one touch:
we fit like strike-slip faults: a surge of fertile frictions merging
in a berth of dust
rhythm sprung like offspring from our bodies
indeed if we continue
we will burn for this one day:
when we’re buried side by side
transform & transubstantiate into
the resourceful dark of hardened coal
a dormant fuel: one spark
& we will flare and spiral upward
risen lucent rings
celestial ropes
of intertwining
a diaphanous dance of moans that rise up to the ozone
generated by the tender motor of the earth’s wild core—
where at last
the remnants of us mesh & melt & mend together—
the ecstatic metamorphosed hardness
of the body’s book shall then dissolve in glory,
liquefy & cool near the first source O holy geofather,
we will seep back into you
an ultramafic river
ferrous iron
bone and marrow freed of frame & name.
Mike Perez earned an MA in Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MFA from the University of Houston. His dad was an aviation expert and his mother is the acclaimed poet Nola Perez—thus Mike considers his current occupation as a professor at an aviation university to be merely Kismet (and DNA) fulfillment. His poems have been published in GLASS, Bloom, Crab Orchard Review, Route Seven Review, The Journal of Florida Studies, and at Winning Writers as a finalist in their annual War Poetry Contest. Book chapters have appeared recently or are forthcoming in The Susan Sontag Anthology, Queer/Adaptations, The Power of Makeup, and Essays on Billie Holiday, an anthology for which he also was lead editor.
Interview with Mike Perez
- How long have you been making art?
- Is art your full-time job? If not, what is?
- What inspired this work?
- What writers or artists inspire you and your work?
- Where can we find your recent or future work?
6. What would you advise those interested in seriously pursuing art?
1. I guess I’ve been writing poetry since around age 13, word-drunk on Sylvia Plath and even entering poetry festivals alongside my mom. That’s another story.
2. Teaching writing is my full-time job—I teach humanities and writing courses, including technical communication, at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, FL. But writing is always at the core of who I am, from poem to poem.
3. “mohs’s scale of hardness” came about while I was taking an undergraduate Geology course as I was completing a long-abandoned undergraduate degree in my mid-thirties. I was taking a science elective and was in mad love with a young man who, somehow, fired my imagination as I was sitting in the Geology course hearing jargon—why and how the two combined in my creative mental kiln is still a mystery to me. The scale of hardness itself gave me a structure to respond to metaphorically, jargon to create images, and a developed conceit—that still surprises me to this day. I got a ‘C’ in Geology and the young man let me go, but “mohs’s” is still here after all these years.
4. Bishop, O’Connor, O’Hara, Shange, Schuyler, Doty, Jericho Brown, and James Allen Hall are all giving me life right now.
5. Where to find more of my poems out online right now: Glass (more geology), The Journal of Florida Studies (even more geology), and Route 7 Review (a mix indeed).
6. If you stay true to the tonal aligned tectonics of your soul as it rubs against your body and aims to make coherent, turmoiled noise, your poems will find a home, though we can’t make a call as to how many years or poems it may take. I defer to the former Miss Gay America Victoria DePaula when she was asked to give similar advice in the movie Pageant to current and aspiring female impersonators: “Stay true to yourself and those around you.” Workshop colleagues, colleagues at readings, mentors (including life itself), and anyone who can share with you the thrills of a beautiful, touching, outrageous, defiant, and messily compressed sonic truth of a poem—stay true to all of these iterations and never negotiate yourself, a draft in progress, no matter how long it takes. It only took 57 years for me to start to know and feel this! Get into this process—the publications will come. Submit and listen and submit no matter how many rejections accrue. Listen to and try to thank the rejections as much as the acceptances. This is both hard and worth it