SPARK When the lightning came through the socket in the house he went out onto the Great American Plain to confront his maker and in the thick night air with only smatterings of rain but the deep thunder that tickles bone he thought of the visions that have changed the world—the brave if slightly stupid ones in the lightning storm with hands splayed against the sky and the human voice daring to find an equivalent sound and then he thought of the love available to all of us like electricity in the wall of a house that sometimes comes unbidden.
TONIC MINOR Cycling the north coast I think of the birth of cool as a blue jay follows me, darting and dipping like Miles. This sound is not ours alone. The trumpet in the darkened club, dense with grief, with revelation, rises out of the blood of all Earth’s creatures, out of the light that sinks into every frantic eye. I know this bird is not sorrow, I know this bird is not grief, but the dark clouds suckling the hills are almost the breast that fills the baby—nearly the waves that slow the backbeat to make the human swoon. I am riding north to escape this body, to encourage wind in its persistent desire to change us. I am riding bird and I am alone, like the giant onstage whose eyes glaze to increase the miles, who welcomes shocks from the road—a sudden lightning, because birds can sense when the earth is about to give, its cymbals will hush... when the sister mysteries will blow out the final note we love. TENDER In the small town of Delhi pronounced Del-high at the gas station on the corner where Route 2 bends eastward Bobby fills his tank then wanders into the aisles of the mini-mart to shadow a heavy-set dull-eyed girl who must have odd genes for there’s something in the way she shifts yet still stares that suggests these hills have been gnawing at her kin since they came one maybe two hundred years ago when the Appalachians were rubber bumpers before the Plains and her kin lodged in because sometimes dreams are pencil lines on the wall the older sibling makes and we feel forever under he’s only passing through but if Bobby stayed he would slip into the old hotel built for the river-men and on loose springs and a damp mattress dream again his escape from the body which troubles the way weather can —ominous then bright then ominous— and draw closer to her sweaty neck her eyes fixed on another bag of chips to listen to her breathe.