Walking along the desert,
I feel the blazing heat,
As a smile comes across my face,
In the knees I feel weak,
The sun brightens the sky,
The sky crystal clear,
Not a cloud in sight,
Not a worry or fear,
A sudden change in scenery,
As I freeze in the bitter cold,
Gusty winds making it difficult to see,
Unable to know where to go,
I search for signs,
To find out where I am,
I cry and yell,
Not knowing what just happened,
On the boardwalk
old men take off their hats
& dream of the city, once theirs,
calling the sea in.
The wind pushes
into the sweat
of a woman a yard wide at the hips,
into the smells
of hotdogs & warm beer
& across sand
a pale spider makes false rushes
at a string trailed
from the fingers of a kid
who is watching a girl's thighs
open as softly
as a clam mined by the sun.
One day in July,
Sierra Nevada
(sun unblocked, high, blazing)
—I was splitting and
stacking tamarack-rounds
for somebody
in town. Heat
came up
through my body to my head.
went blind. I was seventeen,
had learned by then to be
more embarrassed
than frightened
by affliction. I saw
just well enough
to stagger down to the general store,
Perspiring violence derides
The pathetic collapse of dirt.
An effervescence of noises
Depends upon cement for its madness.
Electric light is taut and dull,
Like a nauseated suspense.
This kind of heat is the recollection
Of an orgy in a swamp.
Soiled caskets joined together
Slide to rasping stand-stills.
People savagely tamper
With each other's bodies,
Scampering in and out of doorways.
Weighted with apathetic bales of people
The soiled caskets rattle on.
The scene consists of mosaics
O seeded grass, you army of little men
Crawling up the long slope with quivering, quick blades of steel:
You who storm millions of graves, tiny green tentacles of Earth,
Interlace yourselves tightly over my heart,
And do not let me go:
For I would lie here forever and watch with one eye
The pilgrimaging ants in your dull, savage jungles,
The while with the other I see the stiff lines of the slope
Break in mid-air, a wave surprisingly arrested,
And above them, wavering, dancing, bodiless, colourless, unreal,
The long thin lazy fingers of the heat.
You are clear
O rose, cut in rock,
hard as the descent of hail.
I could scrape the colour
from the petals
like spilt dye from a rock.
If I could break you
I could break a tree.
If I could stir
I could break a tree--
I could break you.
O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.
Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air--
There is a bird that hangs head-down and cries
Between the mango leaves and passion vines.
Below, a spotted serpent twines
And blunts its head against the yellowing skies.
Along the warping ground a turtle scrapes,
And tortured lie glazed fishes in marsh grass.
Across the sky that burnishes like brass
A bat veers, stupid with the yeast of grapes.
They are mowing wheat
Through the heavy days;
Through the silent heat
They are mowing wheat;
Flat fields retreat
Into shrouding haze;
They are mowing wheat
Through the heavy days.