Wheel With a Single Spoke (5 page)

and hurled me upward.

And I found myself slowly at first, then

faster

and then

flashing like thought alone

can congeal into constellations of words –

yes, I found myself sliding

its long, shifting spears,

their butts stuck in the sun,

their points eternally running

toward I-don't-know-what, toward I-don't-know-when.

And as I flashed,

as earth-free as the inside of a cloud,

it seemed I was and was not

toward the past, from the future,

toward what was from what will be,

a number going down,

five,

four,

three,

from ten thousand, maybe thousands of thousands.

VI.

That's how I caught up to them, and passed

the spikes of light,

ancient images torn from the earth.

Like an iron plow that turns over

and throws aside

fat clods of earth,

light cuts through chaos and fills it

with faces, images, seeds

drawn from the blue husk of the globe

it plowed in time and

left somewhere behind.

So I found myself among images

playing among spokes of light,

as thick as sunrise over the ocean

when fireflies are born.

They slide and swarm into a mane

of bitter, tumbling suns,

then they dissipate and unravel

into a whirlpool of cold colors,

passionate but scared,

lucid but innocent,

recombined into meaning.

Laugh, eye: shatter your horizon

and observe and encapture, forever.

Let the cascade of light flood

the famished cave of my soul.

O feet, quiet steps on a threshold.

Adolescence – play it back to me again.

I climb down my rediscovered bodies

like a ladder,

even memories have bodies, even time has spores.

And look, my forgotten friends and first love

and the seventh year of my life rediscovered,

my first yes and first no,

first surprise,

and the air of that time

impaled on a sunray.

VII.

I fell into my heart

like sand through an hourglass.

I fell into my child's heart

like a horse into winter snow.

I fell into a heart that

existed less from

touching me

and fell more quiet.

Each beat was a further wave,

and I swam, swam, and every blow

of my arm pushed

the shores

further from my surroundings.

I swam, I swam

in the sea of innocence,

loneliness of past radiance.

I swam, in a hovering

transparent ocean, I swam.

VIII.

What am I doing, I asked myself, what am I doing

among the glimmers of old innocence

these tips of light, rattling

dead spectacles, unraveled

in lonely spaces? . . .

It is my present, more alive

than reveling light,

I sense the advent of even greater miracles

more than the ordinary years

of my life's beginning: rhomboids, lines

traveling the cold tips of light . . .

So I pulled myself out of the gentle mirage

rarefied like the air over great rocks

when the vision of light decorated my eye

with an extra brow.

IX.

Everything goes up from silver.

The mysteries of icy winds had been abolished.

I added air to air, green, to leaves,

love, to hearts, sky, to grass,

but more important, another presence

to the present.

Everything began from this fulfillment.

Hope was thicker than light.

That which conquered became real

like a solemn preparation

for a sunrise

reflected in a newborn's eye.

Everything took shape from that scream

pouring out of things, which,

with them, became the things.

I love you, I shouted, present moment of my life,

and my shout

shattered into comets.

Every rotten tree trunk had a god.

If a stone cracked open, fast

they put a god in there.

All it took was for a bridge to break

and a god went in the gap,

or for the street to have a pothole

and a god went in there.

Never cut your hand or foot,

not by mistake or on purpose.

They will put a god in the wound,

like they do everywhere, in every place,

they will put a god in there

and tell us to bow, because he

protects everything that leaves itself behind.

Take care, O warrior, do not lose

your eye,

because they will come and put

a god in the socket,

and he will stay there, turned to stone, and we

will move our souls to praise him . . .

And even you will uproot your soul

to praise him like you would a stranger.

I.

Once vanquished without,

the Medieval Era withdrew into

the red and white cells of my blood.

Into a cathedral with pulsing walls it withdrew,

where it constantly emits and absorbs believers

in an absurd cycle

through an absurd area,

and feeds on pieces of the moon

in its desire to exist

it gnaws on them in secret, at night,

while the eyes of the world sleep

and

only the teeth of those who talk in their sleep

appear in the dark,

like a meteor shower

glistening,

they rise and fall in rhythm.

Once vanquished without,

the Medieval Era withdrew into me

and

my own body does not

understand me anymore

and

my own body hates me,

so that it can continue to exist

it hates me.

Thus

it hurries to fall

asleep,

one evening after the next;

and in winter

ever more powerful, it wraps itself

in layers of ice,

quaking and beating and

drowning me deep in itself

trying

to kill me so it could be free

and not-killing me,

still be lived by someone.

II.

But pyres are stacked everywhere inside me,

waiting,

and long, shadowy processions

wear auras of pain.

Pain of a world torn in two

so it can pass through my eyes, two.

Pain of sounds of the world torn

in two,

so they can beat my eardrums, two.

Pain of smells of the world

torn in two,

so they can reach my nostrils, two.

And you, oh you, inner reshaping,

you, paired halves, like

the embrace of a man and his woman,

oh you, and you, and you, and you,

the solemn smack

of halves torn apart,

whose slow flame, so slow

almost a lifetime of flame

rises

to light the pyres, the awaited

foretold, the savior,

the lighting of the pyres.

I was never angry with apples

for being apples, with leaves for being leaves,

with shadow for being shadow, with birds for being birds.

But apples, leaves, shadows, birds,

all of a sudden, were angry with me.

See me taken before the court of leaves,

the court of shadows, apples, birds,

round courts, flying courts,

courts cool and thin.

See me condemned for ignorance,

boredom, disquiet,

stasis.

Sentences written in the language of seeds.

Indictments sealed

with the innards of birds,

cool, ashen atonements, chosen for me.

I rise, head uncovered,

and I try to understand what I deserve

for stupidity . . .

and I cannot, I cannot understand

anything,

and this state itself

grows angry with me

and condemns me, in a way impossible to understand,

to perpetual waiting,

to harmonize meanings with themselves

until they take the form of apples, leaves,

shadows,

birds.

I.

Heart larger than the body,

leaping from all sides at once

and collapsing from all sides,

back over the body

like a shower of lava,

you, content larger than form, here's

self-knowledge, here's

why suffering matter takes birth from itself:

so it can die.

Only he dies who knows himself,

only he is born who is

his own witness.

I need to run, I told myself,

but to do that first I should

pivot my soul

toward my unmoving ancestors,

who have withdrawn into the towers of their bones,

like marrow,

unmoved

like all things taken to their end.

I can run, because they are inside me.

I will run, because only what is

unmoved in itself

can move,

only he who is alone in himself

has company and knows the unrevealed heart

will collapse more powerfully toward its own

center

or,

shattered into planets, will surrender

to fauna and flora,

or

will lie beneath the pyramids,

like the hidden stomach of a strange breast.

II.

Everything is simple, so simple that

it becomes incomprehensible.

Everything is so close, so

close, that

it slips behind the eyes

and is seen no more.

Everything is so perfect

in spring,

that only by surrounding it with myself

can I mark it,

like expanding grass marked

by words for the speaking mouth,

marked by the mouth of the heart,

by the heart to its seed,

to that unmoved in itself, identical

to the pit of the earth

that extends from itself

infinite gravitational arms