- Having Taken lsd Out Near Krum, Texas, June 1978
Flat field, and northward that shrubby windbreak (oaks?) tangled with fallen-away posts and gouached unspoolings of rusted spiked wire
But dirt dirt blown and dirt dusted up as we walked, the wind
in little gusts visible as smudged archings and swallow-dipped bisters tarrying above the gray crumbled furrows
the slurry of daylong walking the amoebic vacancies and tiny cataracts of tripping out there in the dry fields where Soren had come for the light his painting
and Helena had followed, to write and to love Soren
to the grayed farmhouse that stood in the wind out there while we climbed up onto the roof (sticky, I remember, and hot) at dusk to sit and watch the stars, and the broad black sky, the activities of light
we climbed, it seemed, into the sky itself light growing into light, great subtleties [End Page 109]
and once there, in the dark, surrounded by these vast (vast!) outspillings of whited distant light, so generous it seemed to us then that heroism of outflung distance
We were twenty, twenty-one then, sick of history tribal, very kind I think, yodeling occasionally back to the coyotes
And I saw how the stars above us burned how the map arced above me identically whether I closed or opened
my eyes / the stars inside the stars outside hung there sparkling and could be seen in their beauty though I looked out or in [End Page 110]
Joe Ahearn is the author of Five Fictions and Synthetic. His poetry, fiction, translations, criticism, and essays have been widely published, both in this country and abroad. He was a fellow at the Michener Center for Writers and served on the editorial board for Bat City Review.