-from Swift Cinder

CRISOSTO APACHE

from fire

from ignition

buckshot splitting air, cracking space, ricochets off tree bark, tree limbs

scattering brush climbing

high up into Bear Canyon, into the mouth

Wednesday, April 09, 2014, roughly around 3:00 in the afternoon

this specific moment and time

no different than the odious Big Bang

setting a single course a determinant event

billions of years in the making

first refractive light against stars

lifting split light against lit faces

bringing this moment facetiously forward

toward a series of collisions

envelopment of toiling flame engulfing in combustion

gas, subatomic particles obit out of control

nucleus circles expansion girds into guard rails flying fenders

in swift swirls oil sludge, petroleum, plastic and metal

the gestalt sending his ghost into nearby thickets.

t'eesh ash flakes fall softly

t'eesh ash flakes fall in soft particles

t'eesh ash release soft particles

t'eesh ash release of all particles

leaving a gold vacuum of space

there kú'yuu

kú'yuu there

there kú'yuu,

kú'yuu and there

indiscriminate object strewn forming dash board,

quick shot echoing along

Highway 70

collision translates probability cohesion of metallic abrasion

of beauty

upon impact birds scatter, birds cease, shot gun blast

ricochets again off tree barks darting up the canyon again

again

again

again

and again

abbreviate oblique asymptote never meeting its predetermine

coordination

terminus

end point

destination

a formulaic mathematical formula

approaches a straight line

a given course of action

curving the only variable

bow of equation imminent infinity high rate of speed

this straight line continues,

approaching

never supposing to meet its camber

as significant the value of asymptote

we do not fall together

from ash

to ashes

not with fallen flesh

but to fall with flesh

asymptotic straight line finale skidding perpetual motion

in slow motion stills

slow motion still

preceding months

slow motion

long vowel continuation constant yearning of the letter 'o'

late into disappearing night

dispersing into the blank wisps of air

absolve this swift cinder—

—past midnight the following night

eardrums ring over silence

extending artery encumbers

saintly candles burn their somber sway

petrol sings scent of sanctifying beeswax

odorous incumbent

oh how, the flame flickers

leaning shadows cast against obscuring walls

warp shapes dance burns

consummate along minuscule granular surface

that chosen scuttle cupped light

an aspirate flux silence and amorphous

veils cascade

after tiny pirouette flares

Fragments, only fragments

I sink in the snow

shovel in the earth

in the road in the grass and mountains

—Tomaž Šalamun

second section, a slant shoulder impact,

his arm extends a patient persistent throw,

as flat river stone scathe surface, tapping flight

across calm water and mirror light, as though

each gripping rock inside his grasp grows tight,

muscles jolt in slow motion, gather in a slither,

docile stone glides through a sideways slide,

silence from a young waif toward moments come hither,

to a specific moment with rippling water collides—

wait, oh wait, particulates scatter a top laden fuel

mistaken for water, can anyone mistake a plausible

death defying scenario, to sever umbilical as dual

wake from dream a wish cannot want, to erase invisible

strains of scattering car parts, had he not driven so opposite

that hastened his departure, to such a thriving continent,

inside this cricket house,

into night, our body lies awake,

cricket songs assemble

against a judder of paper wings

when moth wing dust disperses,

light vibration procures

a lure into a soaring death flight,

twirling center light

ambient background wavers

absent

into night, our body lie

awake a top flagstone,

cricket songs assemble

scratching their paper wings

and chirrup into desert clefts

we both gather in our beds,

they stay to rub, some hiss,

some strike sparingly

or first gathers in masses,

sand covers arid slabs,

water is all around,

and slithers as old sediments

a crisscross tinder fist,

marks intersections,

white lines pass back and forth,

through and over,

then the white bear comes charging,

breaking through brush and thicket

musters old dirt into heaves of glass,

sprays sinew inside wrists and joints,

divulges over our toroid air mass

empty these demarcate calculations

[4.73-80]

relatives afar, in skeletal trailers houses, can see our saunter,

his small hands clench mine, there was no rain fall,

suckling the half empty bottle of apple juice,

over rocks and sand, the hum of power lines tremble,

leading us across, into the dusty land of Canaan

[4.81-88]

lights flicker at a gas station at Rio Puerco, night insects

swirl in 8mm film trails, erect in a makeshift glass ice case

a polar bear watches over us, from a distance they enter a bar,

late into the evening a few hundred yards away, our eyes leave

the stare of a white bear who oscillates loudly over the building

[4.89-96]

a few drinks in a condo just off a roadway, just off the reservation,

in the mountains, longer into a docile night we drank, just the two of us,

turmoil courses through our vein, a rage inside rivers, a slippage

of rocks and boulders, a reave of engine, a scale of head lamp,

a glare of vague human lumbers in a drive way, we could never

explain the splay of web oxidizing the windshield

[4.97-04]

early morning a crack through trees wake a lingering ghost,

it usurps into a misty tree line, silent we raise from our bed,

a quarter mile down the road, fire fighters pry his body,

a brisk morning calls the ghostly finger to pinch his aorta,

his body suspends, a mangle wreck, inanimate towards Albuquerque

[4.05-12]

he returns home after twenty years in a black Chrysler 300, it had deep

window tints, a shiny rows of crow eyes, he drives the hell out of that car

[4.13-14]

one long tire skid mark, burns tar, scorches earth, metal mesh with polymer,

blood vaporizes, no amount of liquid can extinguish the slow scald

but through boughs,

a forest is still a forest,

just as a door is still a door,

though a door,

through a forest,

exists or enters this child

in it,

from swinging hinge

cross the threshold,

this child small and grim

finds solace among the boughs

a gray hawk in flight,

the sedge wren does scatter

leaving one feather

in a tether as a falling leaf

pass over lower jaw bone

through esophageal aqueduct,

tiny surfeit saliva discharge,

detonates fireflies

every collapse of breath

surpasses a slither

of arid forest wind

septal septet mortar sings

as mute clay expels morsel lips,

hastens exonerate bars

that trudge pacing meadows,

just before expiry,

leaves in a hidden grove

a smudge of severed branches

night moves into diamond sparkle

that shimmers layers about our eyes,

immerse down into the cradle valley inside

a cluster of naked words, reassuring daybreak

is still coming, the Sandia Mountains steeple behind,

a cascade prediction of early bruise bluish light

ascends from the valley below, naked words

plucks a floating mimic muddle of silt river,

river surrounds phonetic carcass mask with new tongues,

we left ourselves behind,

let's call one birth water,

let's call the other fire storm,

we left them behind,

just as we were all left behind, somewhere between

bones of recession and a gullet of inflation,

simulating crane clusters,

where words chose us, when we lay still, motionless,

inside our helpless state,

you said to me, under whispers of blowing sands,

under whispers of two foolish boys,

walking the tight shadow of electric power lines,

electric in our need to wonder the outskirts

of limestone and the western Tularosa basin

plateaus, trying desperately to find a homestead

away from death's small grasp,

here we are walking,

no stagger, again a bewildering path

that leads us both to the same pile of ash,

a pile of ash that will eminently fluster

here are all the angles that fasten

to one path or another

here is the screw impaling beside the roof

here is the unreachable us who flail heavenly about

here is the path that rips through the back of this child

here are the small piles of ash, hidden,

to count when eluding the fiery man

who empties dried shells threaded on string,

by a corral sinking in manure,

here is the fool of a brother whimpering into fingers

on a bed full of fleeting words, coral and turquoise

here inside the pages, coral and turquoise shedding dust,

turning our eyes into red jewel branches

I crawl the tall sunflowers

where the ground is ardent, in the same way of baptism,

and a cross hatches lament, and the arduous

ends of hollow rods is an envious company of a false father

influences under a waste of trees. Wasted by a douse of lies

left under palms for decades, left as welts, forlorn dusk,

planks for ill fitted studs turning the hinges, over which

your casket remains an array at the moment of your lumber

execution of carcinogen

dust slithers over

someplace, binding its fang tracks

in pebbles and sand

we are still too arid to spawl,

too arid to wheeze,

as if I can huddle in a burrow fusillade

with roots of plants

we cannot modify

beneath a brush

a couple of Hister Beetles dig together

through the next world,

where no other, we sense,

crackles of decay for the fertile many

we grimace

but we still crouch below,

maybe, the entire basin squanders

or wastes, maybe the older beetle digresses

without progressing toward

the vast stretch, over the Tularosa Basin,

or how a bird cannot see those

blackened specks against the pebbles beneath it,

but keep soaring until its wings tire,

while the beetle eases lucidly outside their stranger air

as we both think this,

some roads we don't run leave tracks,

in the slinking dust, we both want

to mimic them, and see nothing,

the way a skink speeds though arroyos

not seeing the belly of birds

water rises and gushes

and it means everything will wash

we both want to be fistulous,

a vein or a vessel of powder,

impelling, particles into shards.

we both want to be beneath and dissolve back

into that sludge of birth,

and reform the urges of a bottle grip

so we can both run

while we both sweat, walking on a blustering trail,

suddenly many granules among us, in a white bloom,

streams fast toward White Sands,

among the immense cloud clogging white,

we both stream in its seriatim, never breathing in

forlorn and against ribs,

a fist sprays a bouquet inside bone gullies,

we both strains against bruises, it,

while thickening inside

mother, father, brother ties

graphs from skins,

the cells that harden long and centric,

a threatening impact since,

all the fists disrupt

us both, who keeps the face in forlorn

in forlorn, a bruise that spreads, that strains

and eases like bones, like

plain bones that decay and leans against the ribs

the nature of

our face presses up against

the glass, flat as an opaque

doll face, lucid in the moon

glow

who will say we are the pale

face, lost inside a loose box,

a box place on a grey shelf,

for that eternity,

which will never come

our face presses

up against the glass, round

and distorted

inside an everlasting smile

who will say

we are the pin hole

that allows dust to vacate

through vesicles unseen,

unseen by our opaque eye

who will say

our face distorts

as it presses round against

the lucid moon, never coming,

against the everlasting smile behind it