Red

[with Liszt's "Purgatorio" from A Symphony to Dante's DivineComedy playing in my head—thinking over cantos XV and XVI]

Red is sleep before the long fast dry has made redof most things—a powdery bleeding, a sweepingirritant flow. This great storm we rely on. Tirades.

What the smoke takes from us at the end is the lighting,not the day. It gears up on waking, the shed leavesof a dream of red—what will be written, enclosing

in the hours to come. Already the wind sheavesits prepared piano—in lockdown, we know the timpaniof window in its frame, that might shatter the grooves.

It's where the music carries or drags across scenery,across black & red, across a blue hope that dumpsthe spectrum off the precipice. But the hills are leery

and squat—though edgy. Really, the red air thumpsthe red shed, fusing with the ground it sits upon. Allis stirred up, the deluge striding behind the crump

of ploughs. Indoors is the only way—I test your recallof red and my eyes seize up with grit, the red gritof the contemporary. You'd expect the wrathful,

the percussion of their weapons lost in the howl. Shitstir.We won't know what hits us, what tears the corrugatediron. Invisible fronts made visible are where the mythic

arises, not just out of earth or sky or night or day—bledsunrise and sunset we won't collect in our memories.If not waking to the loss of a reason behind the hand-written

red, what have we? Love takes a word, a seriesof words, to find a way through the earthsmoke. Agnus Dei.And yet there is no religion, no belief in the piano's

disruptions, as fluid as a greenhouse apartment—sayin New York, say as a composer recollects making wiresand hammers sing "Mysterious Adventure." Which way

will red take us as the year unwinds, the firesof burners kicked up, unleashing? When will the delugechange the story? I know you dreamt the red book, the spires

of text, the fonts of despair. This hunger, this rogueaftertaste compelling more of the same—our supplyof experience. Look through the windows—a rouge

smear across the universe. Your favorite color pliesthe world with shades, with slight shifts—carmine,scarlet, vermilion, crimson, dragon's blood where lies

the end of the spectrum as we know it, desire the warning,the lost in the distance. … Who would ever describe this sinfullight as strawberry? Maybe an artificial dye—alizarin—

and where that takes us outside the zone's comfortof your dream I love to hear, taking front and centerthen fading away. Remember, remember, it wasn't

in Rome we saw the two suns but at Ostia Antica,on our way to the port, the way out we couldn't take,the merchant ships having long sailed back to the outer

limits of their range, searching out red, speaking red—fakevalue added to trade. But we saw the suns, and we went backto the center of the ancient city, to the ruins that forsake

any worth we might have to the people passing, a stackof images compiling on memory chips we're sometimescaught in. On? Warm days cold nights and a lack

of constant to calibrate by—reset. No, the stormis almost here, and the fires whipped into the skylie about the nature of smoke. Our carbon forms

parodied by our accents, our recountings. Pack the eskywith perishables, check the torches—the power is sureto go off. To go out into the red is far too risky.

Sleep will come eventually. Sheep seek shelterthat's not there—trees deleted, no alternative provided.All small birds gathered together. We dream of color—of red and redness, wrapped around each other.