Upper Level Disturbances

SHOWINGS

6 SHOWINGS i. I open my eyes and taste God. A sky blue through bare trees Then birds. The spirit moves Surely but not upwards. I make a fire but no words come— Fodder, I say, for tomorrow As green boughs take their time Coming into flame, as smoke hangs In the smallest of places, A sweetness that makes the lungs Constrict, as I strain toward the visible, The stunning labor of breathing As fire now builds its force, As voices work their way To the surface of a river— Sweet glory of the foresting, Bright flicker of the bodying, Burgeoning flame-lengths of the spiriting, As I am my own offering When the unsayable is lodged in the throat. 7 ii. I follow the narrative up the mountain, Great arcs of flame mending and sighing A moment in the world, terra firma Sloped and rucked-up with till, Stobs and understory kilned by the radiants Ghosting the sucking air, ember-thronged The far ridge flecked then submerged with light As wind blows from a large place through a draw Sprawling flame down the backside of the drainage Strange light canting the surge and bevy, Making small the labors of men Hunched to soil as flame-loosened Boulders flail down upon them, Prayers heard, adorned with rivets of fire. 8 iii. I’ve mended the fire and again it’s dying. The wind heaves off, trees rattle, then still. Maybe sun is best at this hour, Birds gone to rapture in the swaying, Hard nubs pulled into leaf-hood, Fields in their sudden-green, The lived scents of morning. I am here, watching light edge down the trees Wondering if you are sleeping, there. 9 iv. Here are flames as I know them, A fire’s dentition across my back— Wind keeps parsing the trees, Radiant strength of hot wafts to ignite Unburned deadfall strewn before me, Spot-fires twitchy down-drainage of a night, Filed rakers of skip-tooth chain glinting through Steam of a saw’s bright kerf. The fire has caught now, is roaring In allowance of its own wind, Creosote flecking cheeks, hair Burned and stenching, All roiling spores hissing— Heat bellows forward, the head, The body, the Christ, the fire— 10 v. Before us the cindered land, Shifting calibrations of light, ash, feldspar, Juts of stumps and smolder— The further we are, the less we are sons Tainted, of a time, of place— Fleeting visions of the valley, the dry flat hills beyond, The points of vantage called memory, agent to any soul. We are far from the river, the witness of the river, far from granted From bounty, from rapture, beyond it— The stillness of otherness we’re led from, The wilderness we are taken into. ...