The Clinging, Fire
by Sarah Fox
"Fire has no definite form but clings to the burning object and thus is bright… Everything that gives light is dependent on something to which it clings, in order that it may continue to shine." — I Ching
"Fire is thus a privileged phenomenon which can explain anything … [Fire] lives in our heart. It lives in the sky. It rises from the depths of the substance … It is cookery and it is apocalypse … It is a tutelary and a terrible divinity."
—Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire
Buried at the bottom of fire is fire’s absence.
You will never find anything else, even
if you wait, or lavish the fire with a primal
kiss, or promise to stow it inside you
while fasting under the full moon; even
if you pray. Or even wax your subtle ego
to a fiercer luster, rub and rub and rub.
Later, you fall asleep in a flower while watching
a movie about a fire, and in the light
of day you wonder if you’re supposed to feel
embarrassed for witching the dance floor
at your own wedding, for disclosing
to the smokers of cigarettes and opium
that you felt flame shafting out of your fingertips
like torch lighters, like, you said, extensions
of your actual body at the molecular level,
and you said that you'd discovered how to sweep
dread away with your killer mudras—Pwah!
One smoker offers a card that reads WARNING:
Do Not Set Self On Fire. But you're high on cosmic
affirmation and forecasts of foreverness, and cast
a red vibratory insurance across the entire span
of night. Later still, you wake up at the bottom
of a pond whose skin flickers with familiar forms
that turn out only to be clouds. There’s no fire
at the bottom of a pond. The fish, too, vanish.
You inhabit the atmosphere of your living
room like a fish surfacing to suck. Outside,
an intoxicated stranger collapses and weeps
in the yard where there used to be fire.
He shouts at the sky: "I don't want to live
in God's neighborhood anymore!" Is he
crying? No, you think, he's just peeing his pants.
You go toward the door, to spook him, and trip,
as usual, over the cat, her white glint and wailing.
But then you remember that the cat has perished.
That was the night before your wedding.
You buried the cat next to the pond, her stiff little
blacked-out eyes left to linger—just in case—left
to suck up the last lick of sun, one last brow beating.
They say we desire containment, and that bodies
do not persist. They say raccoons steal our fish
and our fires, we just can’t see them. They're like dark
matter, phantom monarchs of the shadows. You see
a vase of flowers on the desk instead of your daughter.
You fear you've been too casual about biology,
too “experimental.” You flick your fingers to flint up fire,
but merely spit out a feral mist. All sorts of dazzling
objects are replaced by their negative—reverberating
holes like space cysts swelled with the pus of absence.
“Hello,” you want to say, “do you speak English?”
You remember a wedding, probably your own.
You had fire in the palm of his hand, in the blink of your eye.
At the bottom of every wedding is a burial. Even
the whimpering vagrant's been reduced to a scorched
outline in the grass. On the outskirts of every
sleep is sleep’s shadow, a residue your fingers
slip through reaching for the final words
that daily no longer exist. Looking for the lit
parts, the persistent face, the fire’s forgiveness
around places on your body you’ve never seen before.
Who will tell you what to do? “Tell me what to do.”
Before Completion
"The Judgement…if the little fox, after nearly completing the crossing, / Gets his tail in the water, / There is nothing that would further." —I Ching
We made it to the church alive.
See the rabbits fucking?
I am full of rabbit and have no edge.
But apparently I survive: feels like home
work. Breathing, my earth status:
rapidly unraveling. An other father
offers to embrace me (this is no
longer a church.) Unlike you, he's
imaginary. If he traded places
then you'd be imaginary instead.
Does visual matter hold steady? Am I
even a thought pattern? This is the mind
on drugs (fucking father!) Apocalyptic,
or "Heart of the House"—where?
It was just that I hit my limit,
I hit a nerve gasket
with that stupid sext! (Even
just one hit hurts).
He's not ever going to get a new heart.
(The heart of the matter.) I scan
for his vacant chest against my mind
static, imagine a severed
heart in somebody’s hand. If I could keep
the sight of him steady I would
stick my fist through the hole sawed
out of his ribcage to make a pretend
organ. Grind it in there. I’m in
a space jam. Heart trouble. And then,
the teacher said "inhale forward
into plank." She said “fill your heart
space with gratitude.”
"This is our national joy.”
The imaginary father dangled
a root in my hand.
It felt like holding testicles—each
little tail a perfect whisker.
(Last time I dug up roots I hit
an ants’ nest.) Just getting hit one
time is not really such a big deal.
I am only in your fucking hospital
for the endorphins. They’ve got good
beds here. (I just took one
hit, for old times’ sake.)(I made it
to the hospital alive.) The solstice moon
pretends to be a cross in the sky.
It’s like the third eye of God
the boy, only rabbitlike. I’m apparently
in my yard. I transplant some peonies
over the ants’ nest. My hands work
better than a trowel to feel for the root
tails, snapping them up like a hem seam.
I don’t want to stunt them.
I want to hold the whole thing
in my palm like a live wet heart,
pulsing against my finger grip like a fucking
rabbit. Anyway it’s hard to get
to the bottom of it.
Wife Object
By the time my symbols reached the other
you, goldenly, I was elsewhere “reported threat,”
you know, quietly. I, unsorry & story
wise, wanted a snake. An exact right. Mine.
Her increased range over our little hole. This world
is made by clearing what I’m doing, watch past
doors cry open or break, sunlight not paying
any mind. Feeling fine, then I reach into
the cellar of my face. “Wait,” I said, “you said I was,
I was her.” Canyon… You always end up weeping
when I’m not around, always flaunting fake
symbolism knowing words can be like that. Roaming
among used stones, tender mountain spirits, I recognize
which linguistic detainers I’m clearing, which rights.
Themselves are partly made up (by you) (Right?).
When I was a little girl a chunk of rock
was like that, like you: part emotion part dark ("chiasmus").
Fluid damp circles: not so. No exchanging
power through retaining wall. Place I slice open
if you say don’t. (Tell.) You, depicting as a church
nearly, full of naked submission. I said I
was afraid but I wasn’t. My own original
symbol’s better now, & cuz I don’t want to. I
keep searching the building for our furniture
& for Joan of Arc. I try to mine the goldbits of mine
vis-á-vis intersubjective homestead hoax ([love]
[nest] [ablaze]). But wife wind, like a detonated wing,
storms off with gold of me coiled so depressed
re: want more closer to alone—layers & layers. Diffuse
pathologies family-treeing all up in my business.
Your couch, your steeple, your Tuesdays at 10.
I future us another somewhere with purest thought.
You said “I have two wives” to someone, what did
you say? Am I not for saying to ever? Instead she’s.
My Sword Loves Me
Every once in a while, I give myself permission
not to feel. I'm always the one who's sobbing
and doing drugs. Emotion, addiction, why me?
Why glaciers and matter and the urge to piss?
Why blood, and why not blood? Why sleep, why
rocks by the sea and having to kill, and why does
the little lizard come up to me? I love you,
my ditch flower; I will go with you right now
old man. I'll be apprehendable any day.
I'll grit and bear it truly, I'll be fine. Love
to bleed when you bite into my beauty
tracks, my shame marks; my entire hometown
sang, "No, it didn't hurt. It didn't ovary
a beautiful boy, a beautiful girl, it didn't
switch into a hungry country." Cut.
You would be dead now that I've got the sea
out of my eyes. Yes I love to feel your karma touching
my gravestone, I'm as high as a kite.
But this your dream upon our nostalgia
for dead countries and other feelings
partially lit behind smoked glass
representing the heart (of the heart)
attack's circa Betty Davis eyes. Cream
for I SCREAM MY BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY
ENTIRELY, "NO IT DOESN'T HURT"
is what I said. "I don't know how
it happened I always used to be so young!"
I'd Rather Be Here
—for Bill, Brett, Steve, Jess, & John (Green Lake, July, 2010)
During a lunar eclipse, a woman leaves a gourd filled with water in the yard
so that the Moon might wash her face.
Lake and air lake and air
lake lake lake MOON.
Pronouncing the name of something calls it to life
Voices initiate from stones, feathers pass
between us.
The lake late loosely translates
every sound we pour down the throat of the moon.
Her head is found to be hollow in the back, filled with furry caterpillars that sting like fire.
We who'd rather be here while people suffer
and the planet blackens, while the moon
at the feet of the peoples' hearts drains out into wires.
In order for them to do their jobs, tools must be sung to and fed.
These secrets are among the secrets
implied by our vow to keep our fathers' secrets,
and our collapse, our lack of stature, underfoot of him.
Everyone on Earth has a mother.
The lake itself could be the healing act.
Fugitive moon cube, infraworld
dreamstatic permeating the dock where we gather
to admire each other, the lake churning and gulping below
us on the dock, our mouths full of moon gape.
She swallows the snake meat and it crawls down her throat. That is where her force is born.
The deer and the hummingbird connect us to the earth
in spiritual existence, the crow,
the poem and the weasel. Prayers
for mosquitoes in the bog and for the fears inside us.
The force of the word can cure or kill.
We watch the wet webs sparkle in the dark.
We, who will die, are still alive, our pulses rhyming
with a body of water
and the celestial mechanics of the stars.
*Italicized lines from Incantations: Songs, Spells, and Images by Mayan Women (ed. Ámbar Past)
Landscape Toward a Proper Silence II
By Gail Lukasik
I (Prairie Shelter C)
With night slain
red floods
the green lean of trees
disturbing a prairie
horizontal that makes us hunch
toward the earth
what’s wild flowers
in random creases
beyond us
brown sparrow dart
drape of monarchs
through leaves’ purple underside
ringed in the cars’ undercurrent
that tears across a blue stitch
the road side aches
serrated edges of maple leaves
draining green beneath our tires
a bird refuses flight
II (The Old Manse)
Hawthorne wrote with the white
wall before him
at his back
elms circling through a forest
hands at the window explaining
“Man’s accidents are God’s purposes.”
circle upon circle of leaves straining
to a red
“The smallest twig
Leans clear against the sky”
Sophia wrote in 1843
with her diamond he answered
cutting the glass free
of her, this red he could use
III (Prairie Shelter C)
cars circle purgatorial rings
of the forest preserved
satisfied autumn has begun
somewhere else first
they emerge
into the amber caution
of a traffic light
slowing to a red
they comprehend
IV (Interlaken Subdivsion)
The necks of new houses blot the cornfields. Roads no longer end
with wheat. Now the raw wood aches, it juts out in the winter
morning and soaks up the night’s snow. They grow closer together,
more alike as their bedrooms multiply. Deprived of difference we
thrive on similarity. It’s how we recognize each other. It’s how we
maintain this low pulse. What we see in each other’s eyes is each
other. One night I pulled into my neighbor’s drive, in the dark so
alike.
V ( )
Houses built from the earth up
light seen but not
outside, the family becomes
a hearth as he walks out into
women returning to the blue and white
of a mind
what Wright rejects is
taken away
a family grows up
around him prairie lit
he instructs the land to lie
flat as the horizontal cave
rises
“inside” he says
“we live inside”
when light is absorbed
walls thicken in
the caves at Trois Freres
with the ceiling touching
their heads
they emerge in
to fallow deer, owl
eyes, bison, oxen
here first
winding out
drawing the earth round
underground
the house rises like a man
from sleep
Wright dashes the
land with stone-bending sky
against the stones where he builds
his walls the cool
summer warm
winter rind of songlight
the trail of some
one’s mind opening
space
a flood of stairs stand
like a serpent the hall
bursts into a hearth
where the family is abandoned
again the house is built
around what he calls home
and the prairie moves past
stones the color of
rhododendron
glass spun round light
held in
three wives
& children in the panes
of design look closely
where darkness cuts light into splinters
rays spring
into birds or
stallions
birth opens
into a deeper room
VI (Altamira 30,000-10,000 B.C.)
daylight drains the fields
a red deer under her hand
wild ponies where the wall
begins night time and time
again the eyes open into animal form
what she can’t explain created
till they burst from their mothers
the snake inside the skin
of its own making