The dark, steel drums of waste sinking beneath the mountain. The hot circuitry moaning through the grid, alive, but forced to move. These things wash over me. A crowd draws in, closer to the vast desert, collapse like sinkholes, into fathoms of what I want, what you want, what we think we need. Tell me …
I wanted a ring with a carved Indian face, or a horse hair instrument that droned, but the Gulf was beaten with oil in its gills and feathers, a desperate mix, viscous and black. Give me the horse skull, keep the credit card. Give me a great blue adventure, I’ll just stand and stare. The …
The trees practice it all winter—the honey locusts, with their spiritual thorns, their dry pods of sweetness, the death pale birches like bony priestesses and the deflowered flower girl plums, naked and wind-thrashed, in bruise colors. But, what ascetic hermit can resist disporting when April unbosoms! one of Vermeer’s women, dressed up in such lush …
Half-hidden, her thimble, little dimpled well. What residue of her salt does it contain? (The chary bird in me loves to sip from it.) Measuring tape, scissors… Enough equipment here for the tedious Fates. Yes, here is her favorite pincushion, the sharps and darners stuck in it like small, heroic swords.
She’s thinking of song— dividing the day into eight juicy bits, into sixty little books of six folded sheets, “always in ink,” the worm of oblivion tucked neatly into one gnawed corner— polishing some lapidary idea of a frayed eternity. Her hair is red feathers—a robin’s breast (wary little bird binding us to her paint.) …
Last Friday a man was struck by lightning. He lives to tell it: “My friends heard it strike, saw smoke rising from my body. My shoes flew off!” In the front page photo he looks abashed. Heat gathers drop by drop till the cloud cannot contain it. Lightning sizzles across in a burst of ozone and the whole sky blanches. I love the wild brilliance that will not last. My grandma was afraid of lightning: “If you feel a storm coming, cover your head and pray.” Her house in the old country had a roof of straw. I don’t believe in the god of lightning anymore. My house is stucco and wood. I’m afraid of safety. When the lights go out I’m awake at the window, watching that live wire ignite the fire of water and air that can turn us to ash.
“I don’t want to alarm you, but . . . . ” Don’t but strikes the eardrum first. And then that ellipsis trailing its wake of silence. What? what? Tonight you have been detained in the holding tank of gel and electrodes where a stylus monitors your quaking. Again you are made to repeat your name. In the hush and babble of the ER the whitecoats hover and confer. Lucky you! Not a single positive this time. You may go home to that other life with its soothing clatter, you’ve rehearsed the required emotions. Once again you have passed the test for the wrong disaster.
The internal ear is the essential part of the organ of hearing, receiving the ultimate distribution of the auditory nerve. It is called the labyrinth, from the complexity of its shape… — Gray’s Anatomy In a glass box, hearing’s pivot and swivel, a case of labyrinths. Row upon row of slight, white depths throb and hum. In the first row : a silver spoon stirring sugar into the ear’s cup, spoon of conduction, coiled and eager, prenatal divining rod quivering with dark, underwater bloodbeats, muffled uterine voice start of loud out to fluorescent thrum, the warming table, carol over an aching fontanel. Second row the labyrinths grow and recede : orangutan, flying dog from Madagascar, pale implements, still holding in their hoop the rustle of rain in grass, the sand along the plummeting third : spanned gymnura, trichechus, the chiming sea, its peal, bell of itself and deeper to the prehistoric bear, hyena, echo into the cave. Fifth and sixth row : rodents, curled like hibernation itself, tail spiral, scratch, skitter, trill, and coil, writhe of a pink fingerling pianissimo against the large pachydermal sweep, ivorial and tusking, seventh row, the hoof of the eighth. The last labyrinths : shift to bird, light, light, the case can’t hold them. They hover on the tips of the velvet lining, a golden string, the very origin of inquiry.