Eight Foot Rope
You
are free as the lookout,
That far-seeing joker posted high over
the fog,
Who declared by the time that he had got
himself down
The actual ship had stolen away from
beneath him.
“The
Settle Bed”
Seamus
Heaney
It’s that sun
doesn’t have to negotiate—she comes straight through,
the perfect partners:
window and light. She takes her time,
not dawdling so much as
gaining ground
the slow way, as at first down below it all bilges
and then gaining
the gunwale of horizons she spills and spreads over the counter-
pane over yes, and
through her brain onto the floor of her skull.
East South East
and now the
buoys are easier to see. Consider glass:
windows or floors (or that
horse-shoe skywalk
out over the Grand Canyon)(The! absolute!
Vertigo!) How
glass and sun have met on near equal terms under her
hair and
listen: the furnace of molten sand shudders orgasmic to the fragility
of itself and
the unqualified paradox of the frail is that it’s the only thing
in the world to
take the heat that way. Others go to
ash. Char. Combust.
But inside that
oven, however it’s done, the sun rises and: liquid windows!
Voila!
I wonder at
which blow the sun came on to her, how many fists of cliff struck
her lips her
eyes her cheeks and that long sickle of a gash along the back
of her head
before it was full on dawn and slow to noon and not a fucking
cloud and the
rest in room cover their faces when she’s gone
liquid and they
leave her there for dead. It’s the
slowly seizing up, from the edges
in, when she
begins her recovery (and the man and the woman who beat her walking
under their own
star far away free) and it all comes to windows and lookouts
and the land
she sights in her head and the doctor testing her reflexes weeks
and weeks later
and she laughs and cackles at the obvious when he asks
her what time
it is and she says “Eight foot rope”
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