I do not kill the spider. I do not waste
the other side of the paper. Where the fires
are terrifying the penned-in
horses, I try to give my mind to the horses. Where there is no more water—and none
can be gotten anywhere
anymore—I try to send to that moment
in history
this water. I open the spigot, run it over my hands, cup them, feel it flow away
over these glowing
palms. And bend to it. And put my eyes and mouth
in my water in my
hands. In there
the soldier is still leaning up to me in astonishment
as we both see his
legs gone,
and are
for the briefest instant before the pain and the rest of life, are
there, there is no
sound, we are, with everything else that is in this fire, blinking, astonished,
we stare at each other, all of us,
at the whole planet
in the horse’s eye,
at the spider whose web is jittery in rising smoke, at the blank paper—what is it we
would still
write down I think
in my part of the long held-breath stare in which no sound—no—correction
just before a moment ago
the bell in the nearby
church rang and for
the first time
I could hear as if the inside of the cast iron thing,
and its being struck was
dull, and the smallness
of the sound
cast out by the
steeple
into its large surrounding fields
was thin, was full of the simplicity of cast-iron and no more, was
iron’s telling of iron’s
tale—and you could hear the beading of seams in the interior curve, the tapping of
hammers upon it when
molten—
the being deep in earth the being torn out and smelted and cast and
welded and then repaired again, again, until no further transformation is possible—the earth has been entered, its
contents
removed, given
form,
extreme
heat—and it is delivered into
a belief
system—
which sounds the notes
in this order—the whole song of iron and nothing
else after the silence begins again and in it one
cock crowing in mist, another, a third,
their voices harsh,
low, full of attempted
rise—again, again,
the attempted rise of throat and chest—and the four low-cutting notes of day-
break—
and what now remains of him loosening its first moan, face to face, warning of something—
that the sun is arriving perhaps?—archaic, stone-
filled—
Dawninggathered round the final one unspooling peal—
and I watch the spider in dust, in wind—and I see
horizon begin
its tissued clarifying
again—
such that form
will soon
enter world
anew—and gather round us its rememberment—and yet, for now, just now, these creatures each
singing as if each
alone their
growl and crackle and break and fall and drift and stare and
brazenness, surenesses,
absolutely no impatience,
no rose of sound, no
quivering—
you could hear it as dark wasted blood—wasted as no one is
noticing—no one is
there to see the
throat being cut, so it just leaks and pools
and dries, and it is
that sound,
fate’s sound,
a gut breaking out and
trying to make it rise—
always this desire to rise, to
bloom. Is there nothing that is content to be still. Is there nothing that will
stay in the bowels of earth,
unsaid, unfound, unchanged—is there nothing that will not waken—but
look—it all breaks
out—it all wants to be in
the marketplace the war the wheel the flapping of flags the sounding of the clock the
wing-beating of
wind—where blades flash and we
call it daybreak—where the gaping of point of view opens—and look here they come
out of the caves
into the clearing—here they come carrying huge blocks of stone to make their shrine—
some are masters some are slaves—
the bell the spider the horse the crow in with wind the iron the web the horizon
sending me its firming of out-
line, the first row of
trees advancing my way as
trees, the legs elsewhere than the body
which day shall illumine and point to
saying, there, too late, way too
late, then the beginning of
the next row of
trees, and some diagonals which shall in an instant be rooftops, and then the village, and
now by my
window, as if a crime I
have just this second pen-in-hand remembered I committed last night,
truth slices the burlap
sack of the end of night
open, and leaks its icy—ah—its hate and gorgeousness—oh no here is life I think unable
to step aside its bullet it
comes
into the human heart—there is no stopping it—infected with beauty—and the doorways
are filling, and the windows are opening, and the
desire for an idol leads
us again into the
burning web
which is day.
