Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire - Brenda Hillman Wesleyan Poetry Series

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can’t know,

      interested in kinds of think animals think

      —a rabbit or a skink! (Eumeces skiltonianus)

      when autumn brings a grammar,

      wasps circle the dry stalks

      & you can totally

      see through amber ankles dangling

      in dazzle under our lord the sun

      of literature—

      Between noon & its noun,

      there were ridged

      & golden runes on pumpkins … bluish

      gourds—in the fields …

      (their white eyes lined up

      inside)—Wait a sec. Please

      don’t nail the door shut. The air is friendly

      & non-existent as Veronica’s veil— …

      Earth, don’t torment your fool,

      your ambassador clown. Bring

      the x of oxygen & sex, a fox

      running sideways, through present noon—

      Do you remember Picture Day?

      Then, when the packets came back—

      in each child’s eyes:

      incomprehensible fire—;

      you were ordinary,

      in the sense of: the endangered west;—

      your mother wiped the windshield

      with a shredded Kleenex

      (that’s why you deserved your oily treats)—

      Inside the school, reading made sparks:

      peril, peril, peril-&-awe;

      outside the school, acres of signs

      in cellophane noon, where

      under the school, termites take

      the tasty beams into their bodies—

      [Incisitermes minor] delicate hairless arms …

      Save the volcanoes for later,

      flame-folder. You did such a good job

      with the maps!

      The world has created a sickness

      but the sickness is being

      reversed … Consonants

      can be reasoned with, but vowels

      start fires—now! breathing

      twice: Now! Here come

      the bandit occupiers:

      silence & meaning—

      You argue with someone at work. The chemical change

      in your shadow meets the dry grass at the edge

      of his shadow like an adolescent planning on

      burning a field, or the love you wanted

      to have later with another, the memory of what

      your energy made before he began to speak.

      It is impossible to discuss anything with your boss

      because he has consulted the priest & they

      will never see you again—; you stored that

      in the chamber of geometric symbols, saying

      to the wings above the granary, there is the fact

      of the barren stalks, the pharaoh’s dream

      of hunger, saying to yourself (a prophetic mute),

      the hour will come someday for fire until

      there are years of storing energy in these postures,

      drawing circles with bones from the nine names

      & lights that make words into sticks for

      winnowing the shadows of falsity or ridicule.

      Even the world, wide as it is, cannot exhaust

      the fuel of your life when you are one of

      the interpreters about to escape from the dream

      with your archived & flexible heat, trying

      to keep from hating them at the marketplace,

      to remember what would transform judgment

      into action if only you could abandon the gifts as if

      they were nothing, after you & the pharaoh’s

      huts are long gone; the dream will not be

      idle when it touches the tip of the match

      to the willing field after the harvest—

       FOR BBH & SM

      The immortals wait in the fields.

      & the newt under the laurel (a dragon

      whose three heads argued

      with themselves—),

      the push thistles, Celastrina echo butterfly

      with automatic semi-colons

      on its wings—(‘twill hide

      under the clorox-

      cloud—& that’s that! some punctuation

      is just too sensitive to

      be outside—)

      Stubby white

      teeth on that baby vole:

      smile on its face—screeep! like

      gnostic Jesus, its comma-comma-comma

      claws. Clause—verbless mosquito-egg

      daylight …

      Worker, dreamer:

      your soul has slept with

      countesses so long

      his hands still smell like money!

      He says to himself:

      my lord the sun has thrown

      his sexual shadow upon me … (oops!

      Where did it go?)

      —It’s just fallen behind something.

      (What has?)

      —Whatever you lost.

      Behind the galaxy, there was a flute:

      sound was making love to sound;

      time was making sound

      to sexual, textual, lexical space—

      we worked too hard, we lay

      near fields from which they gathered plastics—

      mimics & contortionists—under the ping-ping

      of meteors, under made-up constellations;

      the planet flew through space junk

      while

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