from WYRD] BIRD
And we wept, as though together we were smit with the love of sacred song.
And in a vision I saw a shining sphere, which I understood to be the world, brighter than any star, but closer than a star and breathing—even, at times, making a high-pitched sound like song. And from each side of the sphere, from the top and from the bottom, I saw two long black ribbons of oil spreading down and up, along the ocean tides, until at the center the two ribbons met, intercurled and coiled.
The dreams too mingle us. The wilt in the trees.
In my dream, I heard the word Satan, uttered distinctly by another voice, though I felt the word in my own mouth, felt its pointed body against my teeth.
And I saw a cop holding a machine gun.
What sounds our dream made in the world night, unmade all the windows, by which I mean smashed.
wilt in the trees] flame, searing one dream into another
world] sublunary
smashed] smashed
But why should even the color red—flat, muddy, morose—choke me with missing you?
And again, I say the word so loud in my head that I start, have I said it aloud this time? And have I breathed it aloud in sleep?
I slipped and fell asleep I slept and fell.
Longing is a green ache, pulling more space out of space, an expanse that gasps, but also pulling us, somehow, together.
You touched my shoulder and pointed up: look, you said, reverie.
And I saw the morning light making a membrane of the most solid forms, pouring through solid objects and drawing them together. And I saw the bleary neon of the strip club—a silhouette of a woman spreading her legs—already flashing on and off in the morning sun.
When the leaves fall and the branches are left bare, then all the bird nests hang huge, in what relief.
Dark magic meddling in the hair of the saints.
Between the toes, rot : in pits, holes, crevices : O Death : your skin how it dampens/s/k/in.
This morning, an apprehension hunches.
Two tents caught among winterbare sumac, high and half in air. Up on the bluff that borders the highway I saw them, see them, from the train into the city, from the car to the airport to the sky. Dawn palely reaches a wrist across sky, a flock of starlings swoops up, down, up, casting and re-casting a spell, form unforming. Some strange phrase I reached for, wrist wished for, something to depict the wild community of this airflung shape, changing.
Hildegard’s visions come to her while she is in a waking state, not a trance, as they come to Mary Robinson, and to Coleridge.
But along the labyrinth’s slick slabs I stumble still, never closer, no longer even certain whether I am struggling out of the maze, or further into its fleshlike corridors.
Still in time am I searching. In time but against it.
return to ISSUE THREE