Limits of the Burning World

Fall piles: the tires, black holes under his lit sneakers

as he runs in & out of them, sweating in the farthest corner

of the yard near an embankment, the edge of the world. He hears

nothing. And in the magazine open on the kitchen counter,

an article about “The Beehive Archive” advertises Utah,

a few of John Muir’s lines—going out, I found, was really going in—over

the image of a waterfall—foggy & galactic, a hosanna,

a kind of rush like the scent of someone not forgotten. October:

upstairs, the door slams. Sometimes, when you squint in the middle

of a street at night, you can almost convince yourself it’s flat.

Muir, inspired pilgrim, knew rare flowers. And how they are riddled

with poisons: red poppy, lady slipper & poinsettia—stems that

burn a little, the dark, bright leaves grown with water, heat

& hands. Over the old tires, the boy falters. He carries these.

~

~

And the earth: mostly liquid. Our bodies, mostly water, small continents,

are mutinies, fractured within it. My desires are peninsular—like the boy

at the edge of the world, I want more, further & faster. Balance,

grasshopper. This month is a piano waltz: vines of slow light coy

in tandem, turning red to wine, lime to yellow. Muir knew

there are numerous ways to tell. The syllables at the ledge of the lips

kazoo yellow & black, hum in the drowsy daytime, a few

round on the tongue. Say October. When sun bleaches the houses white.

Say you have to want so much of it because you deserve so little;

you desire absence, the comfort, heavy & light. Enough. Too much.

This is every-day-danger. For instance, the boy running with flowers fills

his hands with them & is not poisoned, & so there must be beauty in such

risk. Once, I spilled a bottle of rat poison in my eye & my mother

held me under the faucet’s spray until I gasped like a fish.

~

Glance at the neighbor’s house; the sinking light bathes my face. Love

can be a kind of torture that saves. Already it’s made this side of the street

another world entirely. We learn first to drink with our eyes. Move,

I say, get going. October’s thirty-one days. You can make tea,

make work: plenty of brown sugar & cream. Still, the time

before beckons like an old vest hanging in a closet, a sheer blouse

or a tie looped around a hook. I would like to throw a dime

into the air & catch it on my tongue. And if my tongue, a flat house

roofed with syllables, became cold or hot as metal, I could speak

without feeling bankrupt or bereft. The elephant’s

skin never forgets. Warm & coarse, October’s tweeded neurons eke

out territory: blood, sweat, roots. The skin deadened,

though the site map under it feels the body shift, electric turns,

joints of a machine. Looking is pleasure. The world burns.

~

Because space is a vacuum the lost stare into, let’s disagree. The galaxy

is a primitive engine, bolted & edged gears locked together

to grind through days. I felt yesterday like I knew exactly

how to time this magical thinking. Have I not the love of leisure?

The will to play pretend? Forgiveness, always after the fact—

its space stretches, as grace begets more & more of itself,

the starlight receding further & inward. It’s an act

of raking yourself into yourself without an end in sight. Today, I dredged

up from the trash—egg shells, shredded carrot—a receipt I crumpled.

Happy returns! I go out of my way to leave the house.

In the brittle light, there are things too delicate to admit or mumble

aloud. For instance, I won’t say, I will kill to live, though I might. No ruse—

words fail most of the time. My daily worries are about

balance, so I say walk, all of us lost, pilgrims of doubt.

~

Is living an honest life a kind of balance? This one counts,

a friend told me years ago, over & over. He’d chanted prayers,

lulled so that the words in his throat, their sounds,

rose like balloons & bystanders thought him mad, murmuring over

nothing, into a steady grace they didn’t recognize. And this matters:

always we’ll refuse the sacred, beg for home

although we have lost it. And if my terse

negotiations of space are any indication, our private worlds don’t

make us any less in need. And, really, this reminds me of that

book—the protagonist excuses herself from the table & faints,

distracted to the point of revelation, & wakes up like a cat

in sunlight as, here, I put my faith in heartbeats & breath & it taints

everything October, its hush, its trees lit & kneeling.

When I examine the halo around the front door, I see that it’s peeling.

~

Sometimes, I find a bird by the front door, neck small

as an infant’s wrist. So often tenderness lies at the heart

of even the saddest gifts. And after I scoop its limp, mauled

body into a grocery bag, I make a shallow bed in the yard,

hiding it from the paws of a stray. Last October, after class,

one of my students started to cry & snapped a photo of a dead jay

with her cell phone & said, It’s still beautiful. Lost in the past,

I agreed. Its feathers fluttered in the breeze. The girl was violated.

She asked if her paper flowed. Like a waterfall, I said, peering

at her as if she were a moth stuck with pins. What could I say?

The wind, whipped cord, hurt me & I couldn’t shake it away.

Sometimes, words don’t unpack space. Perhaps, fearing

tears, I looked past her. I can’t remember. By now, I hope

she is a galaxy, a blue light lathering the earth like soap.

~

My sister’s postcard arrives: the Blue City in Morocco

where she’s been hiking trails of mountains that rise in twos

like goat horns butting sky. The icehouse tunnels & streets below

cast in a calm, gray light open not unlike the views

that surround the city. There’s a milk-glass moon, she writes,

washed by rain. Nothing’s clean. Even the builders’ wives

curse the loom where they comb, warp & weft, the quarry sites

where earth from earth means walls, stem cells, hives.

In the cemetery where I sit now, the grave of a stone cutter

bears a coiled vine, his green bridle. Bring on the ghost horses,

I think. Through the shifting light, a gang of gnats flutters

like so many sunlit dust particles. In October, necessity forces

the screens into closets before November’s starrier coldness,

days too short to hang up frames or jot down this address.

~

~

~

In a fallen world, unlimited possibility. White water

is the current of blue that feeds it. All good paths lead to water,

the pitcher would tell you if it could speak, as it does per

a chipped mouth in my fist that tips toward the augured

leaves. October: silver shingles, ghost train coming on the blue

whistle of sky, all I can see from here. How naturally I lift to my lips

whatever I can fill my hands with, sugar & bread slipping into

grain. Feel the torque of ceramic handle, the dip

of sunlight through their stoma as they drink:

leaves pearled & shot through with bamboo. October’s elocution,

quick tongued, a ghost slamming the door, an echo pressed in

amber & fixed at the hinges. Behind me is my other self, a split-second

shuffle in the daily watering. Lonely-content is like this:

so dilly-dally, so get-on-with-it, so don’t-hold-your-breath.

~

Don’t hold your breath: everything is moving away from us

even while the unwritten approaches. Today, I sweep ashes

toward the door, a migraine’s discordant hammer of Nonsense

spitting hail-fire through my left retina. And between the dashes

rain connections that open out like a breezy toll road of veins

into the city. And because my temple beats a drum of smoke that white—

objectified, the only consistent thing—rings in bright pangs

behind my eye, the telephone wire between my ear & mouth (the site

of an invisible curtain) is cut off. Clapping. Thunder. Rain begins

to beat on the roof. Lamps flicker & like the line that seeks what the mind

forgets, stains recall the ceiling like stars, new rings,

desire tentacling to satisfy desire. And where the paint reminds

itself to crack, water gathers, an old wound. Don’t wait for me,

I say to no one as the first street lights come on & we leave.

~

~

~

The hours fall through themselves, each geocentric as the first

October, dendrited limbs inside their dressings,

but don’t hold your breath. Everything is moving away from us.

Today, my sister’s postcard arrives: The Blue City in Morocco—

invisible city! Perhaps we build things up in our heads

because space is a vacuum the lost stare into. Let’s disagree. The galaxy!

In a fallen world of unlimited possibility: water

& the earth, mostly liquid, our bodies (also mostly water), small continents.

Glance at the neighbor’s house; the sinking light bathes my face. Love,

as if the flowers the boy carries will kill him by degrees,

fall leaves a heap of tires, black holes, under his lit sneakers.

Sometimes, I find a bird by the front door, neck small—

is living an honest life a kind of balance? This one counts,

as though it were meant from the beginning to fill with fire.