Original Fire (7 page)

Dragging a cart of splinters,

tin nailed to the soles of your feet,

you walk over me. You strike flame from my body.

I burn at the magnetic center as the leaves fall

steps of fire

leading down into the earth.

I find you in my newborn child,

harnessed to my breasts with cotton, small and molten.

Her need for me as pure as my need for you.

I find you in the miraculous dung of the horned beetle

which cures the heart of anguish

I find you in the ash I must become melting in the rain,

new rain, descending.

Call me, speak from the water

lit by spilled oils

Sing to me from the mouth of the fish artfully arranged

on smashed ice.

Sing from the empty seas.

Behind us, before us,

in all things now I praise you.

Gold One. Prime Mover. Boring Prima Facie.

I praise you in Jack Daniel’s at the foot of the bed

and in the isolation of this dream.

Thing of holes, thing of lies, thing of shoulder pads,

thing of beautiful smashed mouth

thing of drenched fabric,

thing unmade by woman in her own body:

I fall face down into the sweet slab of cake

into the roaring flesh, licking crumbs off you

Face down in the yard, in the dust of sexual heat.

I praise you.

In the word

and in the void between words.

You are the pause, the synaptic skip.

You are the meaning between the syllables.

Walking up the water drops until I reach the cloud,

Walking up the leaves

until the crown of the tree is massed

like a cloak around me. Following snow

to the place of snow,

of course I praise you,

there is nothing else,

there is no other task.

When I first began listening to your voice I was huge,

I was a child.

I sat in the ash tree as light froze in the sky

and willed you to leave the kitchen.

Then, suddenly, you were around me in the leaves.

I thought there was laughter in the hissing wind

and I was afraid, I saw

my name written on the dark surface.

Gold One. Mother. Boring Prima Facie.

You and I are dust of cellular radiance,

of intricacy and rushing noise.

Hammer of time, hammer of love.

You rise in the bones of my husband.

You fall in the hands of the silver clock.

You fly off the grasses and you seed the water.

I praise you in the old red-brick house of my childhood

crumbling to rose,

to silver, to agate, to sludge.

Black tar. Deep tar. Cozening preserver.

Steep cliff ignited in the halo

as the sun tips its hood of fire.

I praise you in the cicatrix of sex

and the brilliant umbilical happiness

of sleek, heavy snakes

twining and untwining in the grass.

I praise you in my iron shoes,

magnetized and grounding me.

I praise you in my shoes forged of steam,

in my shoes of dripping felt, my shoes of bottle caps,

my garbage shoes, my shoes of wood ash and velvet,

my uncomplaining shoes, my whore’s shoes

that set me above you.

I praise you underneath me, walking,

my reflection in the unreflecting ground,

moving below me through dirt and ledge.

My twin of the grave.

My death glove. My other.

I praise you in the longing of my infant,

in my children, whom I have brought here to search you out,

who have begun, already, starting with my own face.

God, I have killed you in myself

again, again, dragging you to light by the tail,

I have hammered you to one thin ribbon.

Now I release you!

Blue and coiling in the simple world.

I praise you in the power of these words

to seize your image, to abandon mine.

Every motion of your dance is the dance

of my daily life, and yet you hide yourself.

I praise you in the roaring veil.

How weak I have become walking in my heavy shoes.

You will have to lift me, you will have to be my body.

There is only one perfect love, that between

an infant and its protector.

All else is magical failure.

I sift my thoughts into this perfect zero,

into the silken core between minus and plus.

I walk through the terminal number

backward, into the negative

where deep snow falls.

Again I am a child. I stand in the snow

and all around me is the snow

I stand there until I turn to snow.

And then, for a moment, I know you.

You were made by women.

You were made because we needed someone,

a man, to blame.

You were struck from our hands

and kneaded to your man-shape like dough

Then you rose and rose and doubled to enclose us

in the God-shape, the myth.

Perfect light, manuscript of ions, come toward me.

Advance, shaking, futile.

I remember.

After the rape I went to my chair.

I sat, looking at the carpet.

I felt the angel of forgiveness unfurl her iron wings.

Her feathers ripped through my back like razors

Now, when I close my wings over you—

Know how it is to be a woman,

to fight your way out of the body

only to be cast between the ribs of a man again.

Light of my brain burning day and night,

I praise you as a driver loses the road

in snow and drives across the fields

of snow, the snow absolving human presence.

Star. Failing light. I praise you,

as I’m sitting here, praise you fervently,

and without hope, every day.

The first waves rushed in, immaculate and foaming.

The child was given up to love.

Pressed deeply against the sound of the world,

she breathed the dark spores

of earth, slept underneath the twelve-branched heart.

Let us go down into the earth every night.

Let us bite down,

let us chew the bitter wood to paste

as deer in their winter yards circulate, stripping

everything into themselves

until they drift out,

in spring, wise and ravenous.

I lie down in the grass, watching, and when the coyote turns

her ass to the wind, looks at me across her shoulder,

that is when we regard each other,

as the snow bleeds white around the base of Sweetgrass.

You are everything. There is nowhere

I do not praise you.

In bed, in the body.

You rise toward me in the bones

of my wife, my husband, my lover.

Paging through the white flesh, the black, the brown,

which we wear as we dance the skin dance

Someone please!

Remove my beer-can vest, my skin of vinyl sheet music!

Speak from the water, speak from the fucking.

I praise you in the body out of the body.

Ash I must become in new rain descending.

Child, dear raven’s heart, new messenger.

Hammer of love, hammer of time,

self I’ve killed you in myself,

again, again, dragging you to light by the tail,

pounding you to one thin ribbon.

Now I release you,

blue and coiling in the simple world.

How sad I have become walking in my heavy shoes.

You will have to kill me, you will have to be my body.

Our love like all love is magical failure.

Perfect light, manuscript of ions.

I write your praises

on my own skin

with the stylus of a sharpened nail.

I wake in the blue hours once again,

my whole life spilling through me,

as loons pour

the cold green tea of their laughter

across the rose-slabbed lakes of Ontario.

I am one thing. I am nothing you can name.

I pray in the woods, begging to be taken,

the way leaves and stones are

whirled into your rushing mouth.

River of snow, river of twinned carp,

Sky of three holes, sky of white paper.

I praise you the way shadows

of deer move beyond the cut lawn

stripping everything into them, flowers, bark,

the frail blossoms of the poke, the weeds,

yew trees, cedar, lythrum, tender new labia of phlox.

Shadow of my need, shadow of hunger,

shadow infinite and made of gesture,

my god, my leaf,

graceful, ravenous, moving in endless circles

as the sweet seeds hang waxen yellow in the maple.