The Air Field

To be rooted and unrooted as a tidepool, to spread into the world.

Dear God,

Desert Inn is opening a hole into you. A bird is hollering from a man’s shoulder, as the man is making his way around the earth. The bird sounds like a white macaw. Across the pool, it is a black cat on the wall, ascending the stairs to your apartment and lying around on your bed and beneath your desk, a big fly coming in through the window, the sun rising.

Everyone is going someplace. The sound the bird makes is a whisper, a string of green lights into the heart as true love.

Remember the olive tree which sang these songs, dressed as a noble savage wreath. Remember the blades of grass reflected the moon and those lights, another cat inside crying, slapping its tail.

Dear God,

The horses seem to have switched in advance of the switchboard—the ground is not what you thought!

Dear God,

We see that you have ruined your streets and made your people sick and fearful. You have grown lonesome, and now nearness has come for you at last. See you, all the foundations of the earth. See, you are moving.

It seems to be expanding. It seems to be expressing
its true nature.

Look at that, someone said, the whole is becoming wide. The ground is opening like a bowl. Into the bowl goes the rubber tree, and the air, the high leaves, the yellow ball.

In goes the world’s largest mineral store. God has become so dense, and he is sitting up in the back room. [[the largest crystal sphere taken down out of the truck]]

Dear God,

First put the stone on your head. Open your hands and face, palms up. Now move the light around

around

around

Do you feel it through the air? The world in your hands.

Dear God,

In the darkness I feel the voices you sent through grass when the moon was the light reflected beneath the olive tree. I am in the white shell.

Dear God,

The white shell goes all the way to Ellis Island, and once you get there the island will have become a woman’s breast; there will the oceans give way to a forest, and there will words give way to sound and finally voice, and will the pain become a blanket, will it become an hourglass pulling, its sand become crystal, its mind become crystal, the web getting its rocks off with the windows shut, the frontier exploding.

Above the children’s table, so many jars of curry. The children were dead leaves blowing across the cement. No running! The boys would shout at them, No running in the pool! But the children were dead leaves and all they could do was run. And when they finally ended up in the pool they would float for a while and then they would sink down to the bottom, becoming the sound of the gate spread around like an electric fence.

The operators watched the hole grow open for one hour, and then it became them. It took their eyes and their batons and used them to open itself faster, so that everything around went inside. In went the dead animals, their tender pink sores. Their eyes became the opening also, their blood and skin became the wind rushing all around.

We’re losing the animals, someone said.

In went the black cat, and the stones stacked outside the fence.

Poetry became the opening with the rest of them. It became the feeling in your hands when the stone is on your head and your hands are a bowl. An echo around the rim.

The field was a long wild mole hill. There were palm trees of various sizes and there was one tree that was a fruit called Manhattan fruit, an ornamental. There was its shadow and the grooves running outward from its trunk.

Beneath the tree there is Lily, since she died at the age of nine.

A man and a woman are eating at a table. There is a television on the wall of the restaurant with images of mountains and clouds and valleys, and the man is berating the woman for using fork and knife to eat her chicken wings, didn’t she know how to eat those damned wings!

The woman was fat and frowned.

The man said he wanted to watch something other than the mountains and valleys, anything else but that.

Everyone in the restaurant was enduring an enormous pain.

Outside, the crab man thought he saw an animal, like a beaver or a huge raccoon, but he didn’t see any tail and it seemed to be running upwards on its hind feet. It reminded him of a sloth and an anteater and a wild hog. The animal was running from beneath Manhattan, and it ran across Paradise interstate and disappeared behind the row of restaurants, but to the crab man it looked like the animal ran into the window of the saloon, and he saw it run across the tables, which were empty except for the one where the man and the woman were beginning to act sick, and the animal vanished into the far wall. The man and the woman were hot inside. Their noodles were in the bowl. If anyone prayed, a storm would pull the man out of stratosphere. A black crow drifted across the sky.

It’s the ravens, it’s the ravens.

The fire and the rose.