The Way I Think To Come To Life One Evening
from Claw Mathematics, page 1
ISBN 1-931002-48-7
Petaluma, 2005
$7.00
On my porch in Nogales,
John Marshall lit my cigarette absently.
He thumbed the vinyl strings on his guitar with a callous,
while a bush nearby throbbed with crickets.
Because the odor of butane reminds me of
the snow-scents and fir-needles abundant
in my fourteenth winter,
there is no butane.
He snaps the lighter and it
consumes itself in a flare of moments.
as if this evening and
everything that filled were
a crack and hiss away from vanishing,
mere fuel for an earlier time.
Something may even fuel this very hour, I thought,
but only later on.
John Marhsall, next time you play on my porch,
do not make it talk. Definitely don’t make it speak to me.
Hoof the floorboards and bang so I don’t
understand a thing.
I want to touch the strings, to hold a cricket’s leg
so that it terrifies me, never having felt those thinly
cabled surfaces. I want no name for them,
but to learn the porch beneath my back
a thumb and forefinger at a time.
Give me presence. Give me an incombustible world.
