Life is Beautiful (audio only)
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What is a wound but a flower dying on its descent to the earth, bag of scent filled with war, forest, torches, some trouble that befell now over and done. A wound is a fire sinking into itself. The tinder serves only so long, the log holds on and still it gives up, collapses into its bed of ashes and sand. I burned my hand cooking over a low flame, that flame now alive under my skin, the smell not unpleasant, the wound beautiful as a full-blown peony. Say goodbye to disaster. Shake hands with the unknown, what becomes of us once we’ve been torn apart and returned to our future, naked and small, sewn back together scar by scar.
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The crunch is the thing, a certain joy in crashing through living tissue, a memory of Neanderthal days. —Edward Bunyard, The Anatomy of Dessert, 1929 Teeth at the skin. Anticipation. Then flesh. Grain on the tongue. Eve's knees ground in the dirt of paradise. Newton watching gravity happen. The history of apples in each starry core, every papery chamber's bright bitter seed. Woody stem an infant tree. William Tell and his lucky arrow. Orchards of the Fertile Crescent. Bushels. Fire blight. Scab and powdery mildew. Cedar apple rust. The apple endures. Born of the wild rose, of crab ancestors. The first pip raised in Kazakhstan. Snow White with poison on her lips. The buried blades of Halloween. Budding and grafting. John Chapman in his tin pot hat. Oh Westward Expansion. Apple pie. American as. Hard cider. Winter banana. Melt-in-the-mouth made sweet by hives of Britain's honeybees: white man's flies. O eat. O eat.
Man-made, bejesus hot, patches of sand turned to glass.
Home of Iron Mountain and McCulloch chainsaws.
London Bridge, disassembled, shipped, reassembled.
The white sturgeon stocked, found dead, some lost,
hiding in the depths of Parker Dam. Fifty year-old
monsters, maybe twenty feet long. Lake named
for the Mojave word for blue. Havasu. Havasu.
What we called the sky on largemouth bass days,
striped bass nights, carp, catfish, crappie, razorback,
turtles, stocked, caught, restocked. I stood waist deep
in that dammed blue, and I was beautiful, a life saver
resting on my young hips, childless, oblivious
to politics, to the life carted in and dumped
into the cauldron I swam through, going under,
gliding along the cool sand like a human fish,
white bikini-ed shark flashing my blind side.
We heard a woman died, face down in the sand,
drunk on a 125 degree day. That night we slept
on dampened sheets, a hotel ice bucket on the
bedside table. We sucked the cubes round, slid
the beveled edges down our thighs and spines,
let them melt to pools in the small caves
below our sternums. While you slept beside me
I thought of that woman, her body one long
third degree burn, sweating and turning
under a largo moon, the TV on: seven dead
from Tylenol, the etched black wedge of the
Vietnam Memorial, the Commodore Computer
unveiled, the first artificial heart, just beginning
to wonder if something might be wrong.
The wound cannot close; language is a formal exit is what exits from the wound it documents. The wound is deaf to what it makes; is deaf to exit and to all, and that is its durable self, to be a mayhem that torments a city. The sound comes first and then the word like a wave lightning and then thunder, a glance then a kiss follows and destroys the footprint, mark of the source. It is the source that makes the wound, the wound that makes a poem. It is defeat that makes a poem sing of the light and that means to sing for a while. The soldier leans on his spear. He sings a song of leaning; he leans on a wound to sing of other things. Names appear on a page gentian weeds that talk to gentian words, oral to local, song talk to sing (Singh), and so he goes on with the leaning and the talking. The wound lets him take a breath for a little because it is a cycle of sorts, a system or a wheel a circle that becomes a wheel and is not a sound at all, the idea of a sound and the sound again of an idea that follows so close; say light and then is there light or a wound, an idea of being itself in the thing sound cancels. Is there ever a spear a soldier that leans in, a song that he sings waiting for a battle? This soldier is only a doorway. Say that book is a door. I say the soldier and the local, the word and the weed, the light and the kiss make a mayhem and a meeting. So then that the voice may traverse a field it transmits the soldier on a causeway to the city leaning on a spear and talking, just after the wound opens that never creaks and closes, and has no final page.