THE BURNING WHEEL OVERHEAD

I

It's all fun and the play

of husks and a tuft

of fur, here, where the edges of the stage

get lost in our relentless

focus on the porch.

But the, and that the, upheaval of

a flipbook, in the backseat

pocket, the libretto

And libretto in the gravel, when

he pulls over to the roadside and

you're sick outside the backseat door.

And again time takes his scythe

to scatter time, or permanence, among the

barren, dry, and none to hear the tires

gather gravel.

II

And just as the weather stays the same, isn't

it that nothing was ever wanted

at all, or at least that all 

you wanted was good

and that anything was ever wanted

must be hemmed within 

the buckle, to determine what

can be sustained, and

at the end of summer to sustain it.

And if not then to whom

is it up to teach that

pain is to avoid,

or really that pain is

not a failure of wanting, but

that itself which we called

wanting all along, and what we caught inside the pantry

or in the velvet theater underneath

a bowl, was a sort of heat,

and has its daily hour beside the heart,

and the valkyries?

And so that to let desire

in is a sort of emptying-out, like

to learn a foreign language,

which brings you down, like a

trim of hair, to the very surface, and where

the freedom of finitude becomes

such, or so to hurry you up on

to a specific pedestal.

III

The impossibility of, I can say

anything, just like this: the

impossibility of an orange peel, and

it means how you asked if the

weather tonight doesn't rather

seem to indicate a storm, and then

it did. Her two hands on the

wheel, looking straight out to

the left, because of the effect

of a picture-play, or a living-

picture, and since it was

more important, anyways, than

where she was headed. And that's

what this was all about, the orange

peel, that is, the power lines,

lit orange by inclemency, and

the plum distance in the

castle guard's lazy eye. Also, the

cloud of whitish dust

in the darkening plum dusk

that hangs in her flurrying wake. This

isn't a wake, it's a group of

people who feel the same

aloneness in the full of night,

who are at peace with 

the exhaustibility of thought,

and with the loss of sight

over the planet's curve.