Eclipse

The sea is quiet, and so is the sky, hooded and close, clouds gathering out over the ocean but showing no inclination for land. Even the sea breeze is still. Holding its breath.

I stayed up late to watch the sunrise, driving through the night when sleep wouldn't come. I ended up here. As good a place to watch the new day break itself over the shore as any.

There aren't many houses around;  the beach here is a sliver barely wide enough to stand on backed up against tangled briars and seagrass. It tickles the backs of my bare legs. Brushes, and bites.

There are no birds.

The sun should be rising.  The sand is still shaded dark, dark water swirling around my feet. Swirling. Ripples and eddies, cyclones. I wobble, suddenly dizzy, vision blinking in and out like a pulsar. It must be exhaustion. I haven't slept all night. Or the night before,  really. I'm so tired, but my limbs do not falter. It's like I'm being held up.
I feel sea grass on my legs. It's stinging now. The wind is picking up, driving the clouds toward the shore. And through a break in the darkness, I see it.

The sun rising, blackened by the disc of the moon. Rising, and already in full eclipse. I'm so dizzy I can't look at it for more than a second at a time, but it's unmistakeable. The bright halo, the sun's hazy corona, licks flames around the shores of the moon, I can't look at it, I'm spinning too fast, heart pounding, broken shells digging into my feet, the blackness over the sun growing and growing and melting into the sea, rising to swallow me up. I'm falling, and the wind blows my hair, stinging, sand in my eyes, the darkness is everywhere, I can't

Stop

*spinning*

I woke up with the sun in my eyes, glowing high overhead, grains of sand clinging to my cheek. I wake up with the sunrise, black behind my eyelids. The sheets were tangled around me.  The grass tangles around me. I stood up, fumbling in the darkness, tripping over discarded clothing and driftwood and I opened the curtains, and the sun rising, blackened by the disc of the moon-

Only The Sea

There is a man lying on the shore, eyes closed with white and blue noise pounding in his ears, sweet and deafening. The wind blows across his skin so gentle that he can almost feel the turning of the earth beneath him, dragging its waters through the caress of the moon so that salt warm blue creeps up around his feet. The work of the moon, as ever, is gentle, and irresistible, and inexorable, all the immensity of gravity that binds galaxies together and rips stars apart, all the fury of the cosmos's ancient dance, poured into water that carries little shells up onto the beach to the delight of little hands and sends eddies swirling around the legs of little birds with needle-keen beaks. He hears their cries, old and high, voices of creatures whose mothers and mothers' kin have swept the skies time immemorial since the youth of birds. The man's son feeds them crumbs, and they squabble for bread with an echo of talons and beaks that rent flesh like dune grass. They look to the same moon, farther away, orbiting around an earth that spins slower for the dragging of eons, and the land and the waves remember.

The man remembers that the tide is coming in, and climbs up beyond the reach of the waves, feeling silly for the fear that pricks his breast. It's only the tide. Only the sea.

A little girl, chubby and pigtailed, heaps sand against the rushing water, cheeks pink from the touch of the sun and the intensity of her concentration. Her mother smears lotion across her shoulders, clucking in disapproval at the flush that has already arisen there. The sun has kissed; it will bite. It is unblinking above, heedless, an inferno of such vastness that it pulls worlds along in its wake and bakes them to cinders, piles tall clouds over the tropics and stirs them into hurricanes, fills the deep with every kind of life and burns its own heart in the darkness. The girl's shoulders, despite her mother's efforts, color deep red.

The woman watches the sun sink behind the earth, scattering color across the sky and fire over the waters. “Beautiful,” she thinks. She winces at the pinch of her own skin, burned like her daughter's, and laughs ruefully. It's only a sunburn.

Only after the last flush of dusk is gone and the last light has drained out of the horizon does she remember; only when a gale shakes the windows and the sea kicks up swells like mountains and her burns ache and ache; how the sun touches, and bites, and devours, draws the sea into the sky to crash back down again, crushes atoms together to gild her daughter's hair-

Hush, little girl. It's only the wind. It's only the storm.

It's only the sea.

Syntax

There is a common syntax

to each

new-day-sentence and it

starts

where you’d think (it’s

simple) it starts

with a they or a you or

in rare instances of valor

an “I”

capitalized if necessary by

the

drip

drip

drip of the coffeemaker

hot bitter ellipses

and subject bleeds into mid-morning

verb

(to have, to do, to feel)

(to be)

with perhaps

a reluctant “ly” to soften

(parenthesis- don’t modify “to be” today, please)

each

,midday,

breathe, sleep, don’t think in present progressive or

in future tense

(don’t think in-tense at all)

how many words

do you

need

to fill six pages, single-spaced;

standard margins acceptably fudged-

too many clauses

piling

up

(run on or up or away but don’t leave- you’re still a fragment)

final modifiers

in bed after the light flicks off

eyes wide and sideways and

somewhere

feel some familiar object in the dark

a point

period

drifting off

but maybe this night

won’t

end

Opus

Thy face the Artist will portray

In alabaster-crusted clay-

A monument to alchemy-

Though looking in the red of day

May nothing of its strength betray.

The Sculptor then will surely see

The glory in the heart of thee

And take for sculpting chest and eye

Of heat-soft steel and filigree-

And write therein thy victory.

The Architect, of sunlight shy,

Will make thy skin of fading sky,

And stud it with the lighting stars;

Thy frame the firmament, and high

Will hold its bones, and never die.

And who to render running scars?

The opus lives. That work is ours.

A Fitter Cage

Drip ichor from between my ribs, you cellar things that huddle in that chalky cage, and stain my fingers frostbit with your vileness.

Blood-worms, artery-deep and craven, burrow deeper and through the tissue that holds together, find the last rotting beams in my tumbledown walls and tear their soggy fibers one from another. ‘Till they collapse, bubble and ooze, hot and iron.

Spider-clever, tangled dark lines over and under and through, mad dancers over a fissure-cracked ballroom floor, dance on. Bring down gold-booted feet on rifts already wide and split them. Step heavy, and spread all through.

Dragonflies, many-eyed, flutter in my chest, flutter flint-winged frantic. Down and down, tumbling. Fan great glassy wings; each beat a laceration and breath, too quick, agony.

Burst free, you creatures. Find a fitter cage.

Spider's Bridge

At that time, the animals of the forest were sundered by a great river that flowed through the woods, so swift and deep that none but Raven and Eagle and Sparrow could cross it. The animals looked enviously on them as they soared across on their strong wings, each wishing to have wings of his own so that he might visit his friends on the other side.

Now, one day, Spider, who was known across the forest as the cleverest of all the animals, bethought him of a brilliant plan. He thought to himself, “I make webs to trap Fly and Moth and Bee, and I walk across the threads with my nimble feet that do not stick in the threads. I will build a web for myself a web across the river so that I can visit Fox and Snake.” And so, that night, Spider built a great, strong bridge across the river, and it sparkled with dew in the morning so that it looked like a thing of crystal. He used all of his cunning and brilliance to devise a web that would not snap or drag even in the strongest wind and rain. And he rejoiced and ran across the bridge to meet with Fox and Snake. Those three, great friends long estranged as they were, talked and told stories all through the night and into the next day.

Now, when the other animals awoke, they celebrated, seeing the bridge that arched across the river so gracefully it seemed to float in the air. “Hurray!” they shouted, “Now we can visit our friends across the river!”

And Mouse said, “This must be Spider’s doing. How clever it was of him to build a bridge for all of us!” (Even though Spider had thought only of himself, but that will be forgiven.)

“Yes!” said Raccoon, “And how brave of him to cross the water and build it! Surely he is braver and cleverer than we thought!”

“Now,” said Turtle, “Where is Spider, that he might show us the way across?” But Spider was not there, for he was with Fox and Snake still, spinning tales.

Then Mantis stepped forward, saying, “Spider was not the one who built this bridge. It was I who built it out of crystal. I will show you the way across!” Mantis said this because he was proud, and he hated Spider because the animals called him the cleverest, when Mantis thought that honor should go to himself.

So he stepped out onto the bridge, thinking to pick his way across as he had often watched Spider do on his webs and prove that he was the cleverest. But he did not have Spider’s nimble feet and quick mind, and he did not know the places where the web was dry enough to cross, and he was trapped on the bridge. All the animals laughed, then, and said that Spider was so clever he could trap Mantis without trying.

When Spider returned and found Mantis, he laughed, as was his wont, and he reworked the bridge so that any animal could pass, and placed Mantis in the center, so that every animal to pass over would step across Mantis’s back, and Mantis could say “I make the bridge and am the way across.”

Call Down Fire Upon the Mountain

Morgan never wonders why nobody else can see Her. He’s a prophet, after all, and prophets see things other people can’t. Things like the cruel face the sun hides behind its corona, the secrets scarred into pavement bearing witness to a city’s sins, voices of souls that twist and writhe and press up against the walls of their bodies in pain, the meaning of their screams. All these things are his, and his sight is Hers, a gift from when he was sworn into Her service. He never wonders why She chose him, either. His obedience is absolute.

She sends him visions, mostly while he sleeps, and if he’s lucky the ecstasy of Her presence is enough to numb the pain of waking, the pain that’s etched into his palms by the fingernail She forbids him to cut until they break off and bleed. He keeps a journal beside his mattress, symbols etched into the dark leather by repetition, and he writes Her revelations in red, and in ink when he can afford it, his thin script trailing frantically across the pages. Sometimes reads the journal by the light of a small, high window, hands reverent, shaking, as he turns the pages.

The perils of the world are fourfold: the water, the ice, the fire, and the dark. These are the hands that bind the flesh and free the spirit, and in each there is nobility.

The first of the perils is the water, and the nobility of the water is surety and force. The sin of the water is deception. This unbinding befits the liar, the unfaithful, the false. May their falsehoods be swallowed in the Great Concealer that their spirits may be unburdened.

Every day Morgan walks by his father’s house and the house of his mother along the river, close enough for a child to walk between them or to the water unaccompanied. He turns his Sight to both; today, waves dance around his father’s house, crashing over it in great gasps of spray that dust Morgan’s cheeks. Thank you, he whispers to Her, and he feels the touch of Her on his shoulder, giving her blessing. Thank you, he sobs, wading through the vision-waves that brush the tops of the magnolias along his father’s sidewalk.

The screen door clicks shut behind him, and there is his father, sprawled on the couch, napping in the sluggish afternoon heat. Insensible to the sun beating down outside. Only his head and feet show above the dark blanket pooled around him. Trapped. Drowning. Morgan will save him, and that is his service to Her. The man deserves this, the poisoned life he’s stolen for himself, but She wants him freed from it, and Morgan will deliver. It will be too easy. His father will not stir, sunk into sleep and whisky, while he binds the weights to his ankles and wrists and neck, gently, reverently, with the self-assured grace of a holy man. Nor will his father awaken as cloudy river water fills his nose and mouth and lungs, although maybe he will open his eyes as his heart stutter-stops and feel the river weighing on his chest with the weight of recompense for his lying.

It will be easy to watch, standing on the riverbank, while his father’s soul jars loose of its prison, feels the adulterous deception that drew him away from Mother dissolve into nothing.

Morgan will never love the man, but She bids him forgive, liberate, drown.

So he does.

The second of the perils is the ice, and the nobility of the ice is purity. The sin of the ice is impermanence. This unbinding befits the traitor, the coward, the craven. May their treachery be shattered into stillness that their spirits may be unburdened.

Morgan’s shack sits in a grove of longleaf pines, just past where the town melts into wilderness, as befits a prophet. A storm one summer tore shingles from the roof, and the tar paper shows ripped in places. The inside is bare, lit by smoky tallow candles whose shadows jump at each other with each flicker of a wick.

His brother Harmon visits every day, trims the candles, sweeps the floor. Doesn’t speak as Morgan writes in his book, mutters prayers to Her. She likes Harmon. He’s quiet. He’s there.

Morgan Sees Harmon’s halo and wings sometimes, and he always smiles to himself. Gives his brother a roasted gopher or squirrel to show his appreciation. Harmon only nods, gives no further acknowledgment. Morgan beams at him as he exits each evening without saying goodbye. Harmon is cold, and Harmon is pure, and Morgan loves him. Harmon doesn’t believe in Her, thinks she’s just a fantasy, but Morgan overlooks the blasphemy at Her bidding.

She is not so forgiving of Andrea. Andrea, the oldest sister, who is not only a blasphemer but a traitor to Her prophet, Andrea who lives far away now where it snows in winter and refuses to return, who tried to dose Morgan with those pills that made his soul dim and flutter and his Sight grow weak. Andrea who left them all to Mother and ran.

She hates Andrea.

So at last, when Andrea appears at his door one January bearing a colorful quilt and a teary smile and a thousand (insincere, he knows) apologies for leaving him, She shows Morgan his sister’s tears freezing into her skin, cracking the paper flesh until it flakes off like rotted rubber.

Andrea’s old friend Carie brings him a new bottle of those pills every month, smiles approvingly when she sees they’ve all disappeared. Morgan pours them into a hole under the floor.

While Andrea’s tucking the quilt around his mattress, he pries up the floorboard and takes a handful, shoves them into her mouth and holds it closed, stroking her throat until she swallows. Holds her down until the pills still her limbs, then walks out to the packing store for dry ice. Holds it against her skin until it turns black and slushy, until the ice evaporates, cries as the rest of the warmth steals out of her body.

The third of the perils is the fire, and the nobility of the fire is life. The sin of the fire is consumption. This unbinding befits the wrathful, the tyrant, the sadist. May their malice be purged away along with the instrument of their anger.

Morgan cooks his dinner over the firepit a ways out from his shack, far enough that a stray ember doesn’t catch in the saw palmetto around the tree trunks. He has enough burn marks dotted across his skin, clustering around his shoulders in neat bundles. Some of them are Hers, and some of them are of his Mother. Those are the faint ones, the ones that sometimes wouldn’t scar and so Morgan has to go over them with a hot nailhead to preserve them. She is always there when he does, whispering encouragements and curses and ‘good, good boy’ until his nerves scream from the ecstasy. Sometimes he begs Her to stop, stop making him press the nail down and feel it searing, but She just laughs and laughs and hums like She’s laying him in his cradle and rocking him to sleep, so he goes quiet like She wants.

He douses his cook fire as soon as he’s finished roasting, smothering every coal and stamping out the remains.

The house of his mother in August is beautiful- cream-colored siding and climbing trellises of ivy growing wild and tall unpruned shrubs with their leaves of bright scarlet. The front steps are cracked and crumbling, and the back porch creaks and shivers with rot. Morgan doesn’t hesitate across the soft boards, or throwing back the screen door so that it clatters . His Mother is humming as she stirs a simmering saucepan, radio up loud. She pauses to swallow some pill, washes it down with something out of a bottle. Morgan shivers, a visceral reaction, then remembers there’s no need for that now.

Morgan frowns- he Sees nothing around her, not so much as a flash. He asks Her what he’s to do, why She’s waiting to give her blessing. His hands burn- the lighter in his pocket weighs on him like gold, and he begins drizzling gasoline over the dingy threads of her carpet.

No, Morgan. You are not to free her. Leave this house immediately.

Morgan stifles a whimper, stomach boiling. He turns, slowly, drags his feet back across the doorstep, out onto the porch…

He hears the creak of the board, then a second later the pump of a shotgun. His Mother stares down the barrel with glassy, unfocused eyes, and Morgan jumps, trembling.

Morgan, you little brat, now you listen to me…

Clenches his fist in his pocket…. Feels the lighter.

Prays for forgiveness.

The last of the perils, and the most deadly, is the dark, and the nobility of the dark is absolution. The sin of the dark is sacrilege. The dark takes blasphemers, and for them release is no certain thing. May their disobedience be visited upon themselves by their own hand that it may be put to death in them.

The power of the dark is the knife, and the seat of repentance is the heart.

Down in the River

As I went down in the river-

It was storming, and the river in flood-

No one to pray for my safe return,

I waded out in the rushing water,

Stepping light on the shifting stones-

Plunged my hand in the muddy torrent

And pulled up water to anoint my head.

The river was brown with the foulness of flooding;

Cleaner by far than my face and my hands.

The stones of the bed made treacherous footing.

All the better, for

I went down in the river

To wash myself 

away.

Omen

The oracles say the light that streaked across the sky was an omen, and a terrible, terrible omen. That our children will sicken and our herds go mad and our crops fail, that storms will drive the sea up around our houses and flatten down our trees with hail. We cringe at every south-winging bird, fearing omens yet greater, though no one knows quite what greater condemnation could be visited on us. Not that it would make any difference if we did. Two already have wandered into the forest, hollow-eyed, leaving families and fields to grow fallow.

No one speaks of them.

The harvest approaches, and men oil their plows, slow and distant, wondering whether their work will ever prove fruitful. They meet together and speak in whispers, watching the sky as if to read its tells, as if they don't know it always holds the highest Hand.

Old women watch the sea breathe, dire tongues that think often of death and will find it no great hardship. To them the young women retire and hear of past omens that have come to fruition and omens ill-understood leading heavens know where. They watch the sea together.

It is weeks gone since the sky lit up in prophecy, and no new light comes to us. Still, we wait for ruin.

Wheat rots in the fields while the men oil and sharpen, and the sea gives forth nothing while the women tell their tales, and children play quiet in the hen yards.

We find one of the oracles dead, washed up and shriveled on the beach.

It is a month gone since the omen, and the young men swing scythes in vain against the ruined wheat, despairing of their fathers, and the young women milk until their hands are raw, but they are too few, and the heifers cry out against their swollen udders. Children cry to their mothers and instead find the red hands of their sisters, empty.

We are dying, and no fire has come upon us.

-Nor will, some say, and never return.

Some will not take food and waste away. Others see the dawn and will not rise.

The sun rises red and wroth in their place. I watch it spill out across the water, melting the fog as it surges forward, its wavering beams a line of startled chestnut mares, blood bay stallions, charging toward us. We are still asleep, every dying man and woman.

I am old in my body of few winters, and I do not flee as the sky-fires return, legion now and hanging in their multitudes among the fading stars.

Nor flee I as the fires rain down, molten, glowing, breaking upon the shore to leave pits that hiss and smoke as the sea rushes into them.

The meteors rain down closer upon my right and my left; the sky is lit red, falling. Falling upon our empty houses and shriveled fields, our sleeping people and our fast-awakening children, huddled together and shrinking from the sky.

The sky clouds over, and the fires smoke out, and we are swallowed up by rain.

Creatures' Lullaby

Hush now my little one-

There’s no need for your crying-

Moon’s rising overhead

And bright daylight is dying.

Raise up your glinting eyes-

Don’t fear to face Orion-

The Hunter’s locked up in the stars

And cowers from the Lion.

Wind whistles in the leaves-

And wolves, they howl louder-

Our teeth are yet more keen than theirs;

Our laughing song is prouder.

Hush now my little one-

No man shall be our master.

Don’t fear the falling night-

The day is falling faster.

Opus

Thy face the Artist will portray

In alabaster-crusted clay-

A monument to alchemy-

Though looking in the red of day

May nothing of its strength betray.

The Sculptor then will surely see

The glory in the heart of thee

And take for sculpting chest and eye

Of heat-soft steel and filigree-

And write therein thy victory.

The Architect, of sunlight shy,

Will make thy skin of fading sky,

And stud it with the lighting stars;

Thy frame the firmament, and high

Will hold its bones, and never die.

And who to render running scars?

The opus lives. That work is ours.

The Third Heaven

The moment you feel your feathers brush cage wires, you fly the coop and you’re running homeless now, roosting in dust and railroad tracks and learning to find freedom in cracked paving stones against an aching back and family in the cold kindness of strangers (a little girl gives you her ice cream and says you look sad and you wonder why, because you’re not, and she has your sister’s eyes)-

And you go west because that’s the cardinal direction of flight, because golden fields, world without end, only look like each other and the careless sky is big enough to feel yourself drifting out of your too-tight skin, running up and up and away until you’ve claimed all the distance to the moon to wander in, wander up tall stormheads in circles and through tornadic winds with lightning in your eyes and sometimes you barely make it back inside before the sky collpases onto the ground in a column in front of you and sweeps you away-

But you do make it, make it inside some farmer’s house, hide in his basement and imagine the wailing sirens in the city that are too far away to hear over the storm, just like the ones back where you started running-

And after, you go lay out under the night, and the sky is far too clear to have just boiled over, firmament-jewels burning above the air and above the moon and beyond the limits of your wandering, heavenly storms too far away to fear and wayward planets sprinting in circles around their stars, soft, cool reminder against your back of the wayward planet beneath you, running and running and turning and turning and suddenly you are tired, all the cosmos dancing furiously around you and spinning and spinning and showing face after face to one another, or like the moon keeping half hidden even in flight, and if the earth will keep on hurtling away even after you’re asleep, running forever and never, never running away, maybe you’ll let the heavens do the dancing and give into the pull of gravity like flying.

Flying home.