Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire. Brenda Hillman
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can’t know,
interested in kinds of think animals think
—a rabbit or a skink! (Eumeces skiltonianus)
when autumn brings a grammar,
wasps circle the dry stalks
& you can totally
see through amber ankles dangling
in dazzle under our lord the sun
of literature—
Between noon & its noun,
there were ridged
& golden runes on pumpkins … bluish
gourds—in the fields …
(their white eyes lined up
inside)—Wait a sec. Please
don’t nail the door shut. The air is friendly
& non-existent as Veronica’s veil— …
Earth, don’t torment your fool,
your ambassador clown. Bring
the x of oxygen & sex, a fox
running sideways, through present noon—
SOME KINDS OF READING IN CHILDHOOD
Do you remember Picture Day?
Then, when the packets came back—
in each child’s eyes:
incomprehensible fire—;
you were ordinary,
in the sense of: the endangered west;—
your mother wiped the windshield
with a shredded Kleenex
(that’s why you deserved your oily treats)—
Inside the school, reading made sparks:
peril, peril, peril-&-awe;
outside the school, acres of signs
in cellophane noon, where
under the school, termites take
the tasty beams into their bodies—
[Incisitermes minor] delicate hairless arms …
Save the volcanoes for later,
flame-folder. You did such a good job
with the maps!
The world has created a sickness
but the sickness is being
reversed … Consonants
can be reasoned with, but vowels
start fires—now! breathing
twice: Now! Here come
the bandit occupiers:
silence & meaning—
THE FUEL OF AN INFINITE LIFE
You argue with someone at work. The chemical change
in your shadow meets the dry grass at the edge
of his shadow like an adolescent planning on
burning a field, or the love you wanted
to have later with another, the memory of what
your energy made before he began to speak.
It is impossible to discuss anything with your boss
because he has consulted the priest & they
will never see you again—; you stored that
in the chamber of geometric symbols, saying
to the wings above the granary, there is the fact
of the barren stalks, the pharaoh’s dream
of hunger, saying to yourself (a prophetic mute),
the hour will come someday for fire until
there are years of storing energy in these postures,
drawing circles with bones from the nine names
& lights that make words into sticks for
winnowing the shadows of falsity or ridicule.
Even the world, wide as it is, cannot exhaust
the fuel of your life when you are one of
the interpreters about to escape from the dream
with your archived & flexible heat, trying
to keep from hating them at the marketplace,
to remember what would transform judgment
into action if only you could abandon the gifts as if
they were nothing, after you & the pharaoh’s
huts are long gone; the dream will not be
idle when it touches the tip of the match
to the willing field after the harvest—
FOR BBH & SM
GRAMMAR OF THIS LIFE AT NOON
The immortals wait in the fields.
& the newt under the laurel (a dragon
whose three heads argued
with themselves—),
the push thistles, Celastrina echo butterfly
with automatic semi-colons
on its wings—(‘twill hide
under the clorox-
cloud—& that’s that! some punctuation
is just too sensitive to
be outside—)
Stubby white
teeth on that baby vole:
smile on its face—screeep! like
gnostic Jesus, its comma-comma-comma
claws. Clause—verbless mosquito-egg
daylight …
Worker, dreamer:
your soul has slept with
countesses so long
his hands still smell like money!
He says to himself:
my lord the sun has thrown
his sexual shadow upon me … (oops!
Where did it go?)
—It’s just fallen behind something.
(What has?)
—Whatever you lost.
GEMINID SHOWERS & HEALTH CARE REFORM
Behind the galaxy, there was a flute:
sound was making love to sound;
time was making sound
to sexual, textual, lexical space—
we worked too hard, we lay
near fields from which they gathered plastics—
mimics & contortionists—under the ping-ping
of meteors, under made-up constellations;
the planet flew through space junk
while