Wheel With a Single Spoke Read Free

hands,
    and every evening,
    I dropped down to the stones, my head sparking
    on impact.
    The thick, black oil of nighttime dreams
    not blood
    spurted from my forehead
    and spread around me like a pool,
    like a lake rising
    against a single shore –
    the bone of my brow.
    Everything moved far from me,
    like the heart, before death.
    Everything was closer to me
    than a retina wounded by light.
    I was on the edge of a black lake
    with a single shore
    (the bone of my brow)
    and I could see through it, like
    through a magnifying glass.
    III.
    I looked through the black glass
    of nighttime dreams,
    deep into the earth,
    where the sun falls in flicks,
    and lindens over their shadows,
    my hands fell beside smooth stones,
    half in darkness, half in light.
    My eyelids fell battered
    by ancient skies never seen before.
    (Outside, a gaze broke
    and fell, floating alone.)
    The light fell in round spaces
    unraveled into shakes and waves,
    it hit the edges and unheard
    blacker and blacker hummed the sound.
    IV.
    But corpses fill the depths of the earth
    and there is no room, no room, no room
    for questions.
    Like roots, dead skeletons
    twist the quick of the earth, and wring
    the lava out, until it loses its mind.
    Here there is never room, no room, no room,
    even time must enter time
    like facing mirrors.
    Even memories must enter memories,
    and my childhood face
    has ten eyes squeezed together,
    ready to pile all their images together
    in a deadly mound.
    I was dizzy, I looked into the quick of the earth –
    from every age
    hung a body
    less and less filled out,
    less material,
    like a worm cut into bait
    to hook the years.
    Here there is never room, no room, no room.
    The black lens of nighttime dreams
    will not reveal even one fissure
    where I could lay down
    and put a question to rest.
    The quick of the earth is full
    of homes of corpses,
    and there is no room, no room, no room,
    for questions.
    There are ten skulls in a skull.
    There are ten shanks in a shank.
    There are ten sockets in an eye socket.
    Everything ramifies downward,
    an uninterrupted root of bone
    that wrings out of itself
    black death, black lava,
    pits and cores, lost time.
    V.
    I was trying to string the light
    when the bow suddenly straightened
    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