Fault

Accidental

32 Accidental 1. I move into it and the world solidifies— scorched hill giving to cool range, tree to forest— and keeps giving. The way I hold the expected note against its shift, a kind of ghost, in the space between them a life’s sweet pain. All horizon, this dawn I run through, summer falling into afternoon, when he, still now sleeping, will pump his bike up this same canyon while I sit dreaming frescoes on ancient walls, colors 33 brushed white by time’s long flutter of wings, walls I walked through, standing as if surprised to find themselves supporting no roof, no attic, no portrait or rack for hanging spoons and crockery over space the archaeologist believes burned under food as if to hurry time. 2. About which we say, Done. Through which water still flows and fire tears, air eroding under that stream giving up stillness, leaving disaster’s ghost etched on the walls, 34 no more. Smoke pours out windows, empties into nothing, knots my chest. So close my mind still bellies all night under smoke, pulls the plug, turns the water on, passes on danger—while, 3. across a continent, an ocean, fingers touched wires, set the timer, so intentional, so gentle, their precision looked like nothing so much as love, until wall came down, floor on floor collapsed like time; until the shoppers, militiamen taking 35 days off, mothers with strollers stepped into that separate space a moment dismembered, silence holding, held as if dust could stop its flight, until the mouth opened, the first scream entering time. 4. Millennia later. The second before. I’m still beating against the world as if it mattered, shaking my hair free of those wings as if I could, as he shakes off the bee—lazed coincidence of flight he’s wheeled into— and in one gesture’s 36 passing irritation enters time’s slant skid sideways, wheels holding his weight it seems forever, then wheel folding; and even as he tells me how he got us here, into emergency, my mind slips his words, grasps how space folds— moment’s comprehension, the way a bird’s color flutters the eye, mind never composing it into bird. Then gone; the head meeting asphalt in that moment 37 thinks, Gone. I knew this was coming. 5. Blood. Flash of green and light estranged by chemical wash, long adrenalin surge toward the wail. I almost had control, he says later. I almost had it, under doctor’s hands seaming flesh over bone. How many stitches? I ask, but I think emergency room, as if it made its own space, as if my mind could hold one thing, my lucky life of near misses and their ghosts, and he says I almost had it 38 and I hold his hand, wondering how to get the blood from his long hair, his favorite green shirt, trying not to picture earth’s dizzy flash of spoke, how soft is bone and tissue he carries his life in, its matter lately divided, abstracted by numbers, bits so minute they dissolve even my love into mere idea (his so solid shoulder, blood on my hand), and I can no more imagine them than infinity. Which they contain. Late summer, 1998 ...