In a Moment

Heavy stones exploded from the bridge above when the volcano exploded. Fires raged up hillsides from those tracks. The whole landscape undermined with coal dug ruthfully from the ground like Franz Kline's black and white paintings from his childhood in Wilkes Barre Wales. Life next to tracks where the engine smoke was not scrubbed, black as soot, two tracks, the freight trains passed, up from the yard, outcome of hillsides undermined by extraction, a blessing that prevented development. Oil seep stained the ground with its derelict pump, balancing on the rails those years up from the Roundhouse, shooting out insulators, collecting torpedoes and flares along the tracks to fasten and drop on rocks below. He woke on the mid line between sea and land. There was a decompression of bends and chokes, plumbed with beached lungs, oxygen entering. The tongue spoke after awhile that it was a sea without end once, before, the water not wet, no currents, no boats or flood to ratchet stones. Those who walk underground sink a shaft far from the inhabited surface, swinging to and fro, hanging by a rope. Those ignorant of the future stay in the lines, don't walk the tracks with a gun. Will I have eyes at the bottom of the sea, supposing I descend the endless stairs? which fit a soul to make gunpowder from potassium chlorate to explode in basements. 

The stars set out to mark the seasons of change. Stars like figs. A strong wind to litter the ground, ripe to overripe. Here's to the thorn in flower. Here is one small way to access close-curtained light to Utterance. So what do you pick them up with, one by one? Overt nakedness. The fig has kept its secret. You see through the scarlet. That's how a fig lies. Sewn fig leaves. Walnuts fall to perdition, not Tartarus, deepest of all underworlds, one last scientifically attained gold dig. Ask and it shall be given. Maybe that's why. It's as though the figs were eager to fall, like divers push on their horns for position, jockeying rash things, and then they change their minds embarrassed by the better sort. Whether before or after star worship, fig bondage exudes till a drop of ripeness and it is all. I wanted the taste of a word in my mouth.

  The schoolhouse was built on the side of a cliff across from the oil well that came in and gushed against the windows of the school overlooking the tracks. Creek pools contained water scorpions, a large attraction in this time and place of the War, the pirates, steel guitars playing in a blizzard before a few thousand people, amenities of the modern that retained mills and factories and freedom of access so that ten year olds could hitch downtown and back. Rural, rough, elemental. Snow maples, elms, pilsner, the largest class that small school had seen. One is born a text and context, voluntary and not, not like where there are options and choices but nobody knows what to do.

 His family had moved in that last year, back from where it moved when he was five. He had hence grown up in those strip mined hills, forests, creeks. I used to walk those slag piles too, some may exist to this day, giant pits, canyons with green water at the bottom, a kind of mountain lake, but treacherous. He would leave while his family was still asleep early in the morning and walk the steppes. The town was bordered on one side by two tracks, just prior to a yard of large importance with a roundhouse. Black soot would billow up from the engines. We always had a supply of flares and torpedoes on hand, if not dynamite. The tracks bordered the Creek which contained the wreckage of several trains; large cubes of scrap metal stuck up from the shallows. The rails followed the creek part way, lined with telegraph poles on the creek side, tracks set into the mountains, that rose up from the flat of the valley and the farms on the other side, created a fierce updraft that reared with flames during fires caused in dry spells by those trains. Then the small town would rally its volunteers and fight the flames with mats and rakes as the flames rose up the hills fifty, a hundred feet in the air. I say this as a participant, that there is a place where nothing is real, but you can have anything you want. I talked there to a lot of people, especially one guy who had just made a river, but I didn't know if it was wet - river, sky, relations all superficial patinas.

The young man from Santa Elena said, "I want to be like you," in and around these events where I was hunting tropical fish with blue and gold fins at the base of the volcano.  The streams of the national park beneath the mount, at the Basilica, swam with them. It was the closest I came to his dream to catch tropical fish in the Amazon, unless I am myself the fish who took the hook and was caught, Jonah who turned the light off and watched his pupils dilate in the dark. This fled from him as much as he did seek. It's dark in the fish. The consolation is you get to be alone, for he went natural to these events and when they were done got spit back up. In the  reflections of the sea even darkness dawns. Fish flee the shadows above. He asked to be a poet On the Way Out of Sheol. I wrote in the dark, but the dark turned to light. The wind blew out the depth. Wind took him on the height. In the night, in the dawn, rescue from trouble.

The underwater landscape is clearer than air. Underwater is the same as inner water, the swim of thought, the breakers, the beach, coming down to the surf, going in, do you even know when you’re in the water or out, tortoise, clam, some small squid, minnow maybe, looking down, looking up and then the most amazing coincidence to give life to some other being! It’s a problem to steal back what was stolen, a political offense for commentators. How can you want to be like someone who has no idea of what or who he is? Come back to the fish in a pond or on a hook, in the sea where the currents and predators or lack might convince a fish it was special, selected, destined, but if just lucky, impervious to the runoff that amazed, aghast and tried not to show it.

 Whose name is this, this name and this, like a spaceman from Solaris in these uncircumcised ethnic ways, not knowing whether he was an ethnic being or not, he ran a bath for bronze grave stones those summers. Molds cast for graves were brought after casting to be cleansed from the names and dates fastened in bronze letters to the layout with wax. After casting, the molds were soaked in superheated water of the bath.  Standing at the vat, with arm length rubber gloves, he removed the letters, wire brushed the blanks, sorted the letters, loaded the blanks on skids to be recast. The next summer after those I worked alongside him at Container Corp in Manuk cutting up skid loads of cartons with a jackhammer. It explains some way how a style of the Bible, methane and apocalypse got mixed up together and carded at the door, "how did you get in," "what do you want." To compare the alternate memories, he later traded a teaching fellowship at the demise of Allende for a black college in Carolina and the demise of Dr. King. 

 The eye has this naturalizing quality, it must look and live before it recognizes, especially if it knows the pattern existed in its mind before the making and during the unmaking, folds and curves make shadow, constantly recast the image, which seems to be moving. It depends on your point of view, high hopes and dreams, improbable curvilinear figures not quite named. Reality is that hard to accept, but then it exists The eye tries to make these look like something it recognizes and taken for what is in soda cans and trucks, if we could bring ourselves to admit. To know large and small, that rich and poor are of their own and that is the nature of knowing, knowledge proceeds without limits, allowing. It sounds like space and at end incomplete work, a gift. Wind shifts and plucks up, but people do like the universe to send  its bidding. Dry earth moves mountains and the sea. Windows light up Scandinavia.They pick children up by the heels in heaven to shake them down in the beginning. Whether any of it does any good one neighbor apologized the same as Jonah, "will I have eyes at the bottom of the sea, supposing I descend there on endless stairs where future things swim in empty outlines of skeletons?"

The whole insisted, just unknown, neither he nor I of whom I speak could be credited with such thoughts, future things swim before me in empty outlines and skeletons, all the past grown dim. When I say he went natural on this journey it means the last first. First the journey. At no time in all the years with friends or family, confidential extremes, were any ever mentioned, not even that they had taken place, much less what they meant. It must be a species of PTSD like spending a year in a German POW camp and writing about it four decades, only in letters to his daughter overseas, but never face to face. Invisibility. All told they call it shock but it's not. Not that that son was superficial who lay in the forest to resolve the stars to earth. One remembers this as felt. If knowing is to be seen, touched or felt, what matters is faith understood.