·:[ Stephen Vincent ]:·
• • • • •

(This is the first part of a little series of anecdotes and analysis of the San Francisco Mayor’s December 9 run-off election race between Gavin Newsom and Matt Gonzales. The series is also running in Andrew Felsinger’s Vert, a fine contemporary literary magazine: http://www.litvert.com )

******

Matt Gonzales is round, Gavin Newsom is flat. Gavin’s photo as teenager in morning Chron exudes suspicious Modesto innocence of whatever his name was in American Grafitti. Glad-handing and feeding off and feeding the Rich Elders.

Matt’s high school photo, the long sideburns, thin angular face suggests “I will be your teen idol” in that New Jersey wannabe crooner Italian mode - “Even if we don’t go all the way, I will whisper sweet nothings in your ear and make you feel like you can be with your friends and let on like we’ve really done it, anyway.” A much harder read - the sensual, imaginative physical in blend with the political righteous.

“Newsom is a spoiled brat subsidized by the Getty family. Gordon Getty does not want to be Mayor. He just wants a pawn, a little shit like Newsom that he can tell what to do.” Retired Shriner, City native, 79 years old, Noe Valley Bar & Grill, 24th & Church.

“We went out on a date. I will never forgive him for not walking me all the way home, but I’m still definitely voting for him.” Young woman with yellow on black Gonzales button, smiling, as if she still got something, getting coffee at Tartine’s.

“Three Newsom people came to my door. ‘Aren’t you in the wrong neighborhood?’ I asked them. They didn’t care. They kept pushing posters and bumper stickers at me. I am sure they were getting paid and had to get rid of the stuff to show their bosses that they did their work.” My 26 year old son, Lucas, at home in the Mission near General Hospital.

When, one by one, the Gonzales’ young come to my door - at least three times last week - they often seem about to giggle, as if political virgins carrying a giddy secret, a special possibility, as if Matt is a fertile goat, a few votes away from leaping full born out of the electoral cradle. Someone who promises to mate with City desires.

“I voted for Matt the first time. Now I don’t know. Did you read the Independent this morning. He’s got the support of Wong, the Developer, who’s also taking down forests in the Amazon. How can he still be Green?” Thirty-something woman outside the Dolores Café.

“I am worried about Matt. Art Agnos is behind him. Agnos is the one who caused the homeless problem in the first. One of them - either Newsom or Matt has to do something about the homeless. Everyday in this town it’s like running the gauntlet.” Another woman outside the Dolores Café.

“I want to vote for a guy who can afford a hair cut at Isa’s.” Isa at Isa’s Hair Salon. “I guess you know who I am voting for.”

“It’s only because you own buildings, Isa.”

Matt’s campaign surrounded by dark and light.

18th and Guerrero - the Mission - is Gonzales territory. Not an apartment, and often several, with one or more windows checkered with “Matt Gonzales” signs. Instinctively the young prefer the round to the stiff.

Then there is always the turf war - the one who will protect rent control and the one - backed by the Landlords - who will take it away.
Gonzales, the fertile goat ready to mate with the imaginative soul of the City. Gavin, the shielded cow, once elected, all udders ready for the corporate pulling. The City as Muse - the dignified, classy, sexy lady who is ready to dance - either fiercely or slowly - no matter in the light or the dark. Versus the City as the unimaginative, much drained, trammeled upon, borderline, hardly working, used-up, sad, Civil Service whore.

In the eyes of many it’s the risk of poetry versus an exhausted, predictable prose. Matt is considered a friend of poets and a great reader and public supporter of poetry. Recently, at a “Poetry Reading for Gonzales.” he was able to identify about 20 photographs of the 19th and 20th Century poets on the poster, and, more recently, helped lead the San Francisco Library’s celebration of the 100th birthday of Carl Rakosi.

Secure investments versus sensuality, imagination, risk and desire. Why one first comes and the young continue to come to the City.

The City Trembles - Youth going to a war it wants, and, insistently wants to win. To regenerate the City, anew.

It will be a cliff hanger. Or a flaming loss. Vote.

Wounded Screams at Walter Reed
(Washington, D.C., Gothics News Service, November 24, 2003)

In response to neighborhood complaints, top officials at Walter Reed Army Medical Center have announced that the Hospital recently installed acoustic applications for the muffling and, if possible, the complete elimination of screams, moans, and other dreadful sounds that neighbors claim emanate each night through the brick walls, double paned windows and cobbled roofs of the enormous facility. Long considered the Army’s center of gravity for complex care, since the Spring start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the hospital has received into its care more than 750 critically wounded and maimed soldiers, including, most famously, Private Jessica Lynch.

Apparently, according to the Center’s residential neighbors, one need that still cannot be met or quelled is the nocturnal howling sounds that are made by the suffering soldiers. Hallucinatory battlefield nightmares, intimate memories associated with the brutal killing of fellow soldiers and the sights of wounded, tortured and killed Iraqi civilians and soldiers, each contribute to the blood curdling, wrathful sounds that seem to emerge from unquenchable depths of these wounded, mostly young people. Many hospital staff – unable to either administer suitable tranquilizers or find alternative acoustic shelter from within the hospital - are forced to take time off to find other means of tranquilizing their own, now partially fractured, nervous systems

As Operation Iraqi Freedom still continues to generate more and more casualties, the soldier’s unbearable sounds of grief and dread apparently increased to a level where the neighborhoods around Walter Reed made vivid complaints to the hospital administration. “We and our children are being driven mad by the insistent noise, “ they angrily reported. “First we woke up to the soldier’s nightmares; now we wake up to our own. It’s not only the private pain of the soldiers, but people are also convinced that we are also hearing the voices and sounds of Iraqi wounded and dying. It’s as if our own soldiers have brought home the entire war. Late at night, when we look out on the streets, we actually see many of our neighbors frantically walking in their sleep, their faces white as the first sheets wrapped around the bodies of the dead, their voices screaming as if they, too, were casualties in the hospital.”

The Walter Reed Hospital Administration has tried to calm people down with stories that the nocturnal sounds of the wounded are typical of most wars and that it is the traditional duty of citizens to absorb the shocks of its wounded. Apparently, however, the local neighborhoods refuse this form of reasoning. Many are now reported to be calling Senators and Congresspersons to insist the President’s new budget include thick acoustic partitions, and even domes to protect the entire neighborhood from the dreaded sounds.

Recently, an interested visitor and English Professor from Baltimore, gave his thoughts to the local Press. “The problem reminds me,” he said, “of Edgar Allan Poe’s story, ‘The Black Cat”, the one where the protagonist keeps trying to bury the cat in order to quench the scream of what he considers this evil beast. The Hospital” he added, “has been working on this scream issue since the start of the war. It’s, of course, grown with the increase of casualties. When I went inside the Hospital to investigate, the corridors and rooms are now a labyrinth of thick, acoustic partitions. The engineers have even put acoustic padding at intervals through out the system of air ducts. No matter how much these engineers install, however, the sound keeps coming out. If it continues, one can imagine the howling will cross into every town in America, into every house and bedroom, and, finally, will go all the way up into the White House and the Pentagon and curdle right into the ears the President, as well as those of Rumsfeld, Cheney and Wolfolitz.”

The Professor did not take questions, preferring to let the facts and possible consequence speak for themselves. The Walter Reed Center’s comments on his remarks were limited to saying that the gentleman, of course, was at liberty to say what he wanted, but that his remarks were not consistent with the well-known provisions and spirit of either the Patriot or Homeland Security Act.

tThe psychic energy of the moment is totally focused on London, the impending erruption: demonstrators of multiple political stripes (relgious, ethnic, environmental, economic, etc.) each one collaboratively and oppostionally aimed at two men (Bush Blair) these joined at the hip twins who with their cohorts have concocted the most self-destructive global agenda and implosion that I, and many of us, have ever experienced.

It’s war. My energies and prayers go to the demonstrators. They have 48 hours to do everything possible to pop this terrible dark balloon. Perhaps. It will mean stripping the media of every clever “what you see is not true” commentary.

It will be a bit like the brave Italian in charge of the Italian presence in Iraq - who announced Bremer, the Occupation et al - is a fraud. Or the Israel Officers finally essentially saying Ariel Sharon is a pathological thug witlessly bent on the destruction of Israel. I wait a similar break through event.

Who can be optimistic I don’t know. Resurecting the community of the world - indeed fractious in all of its parts - intent, nevertheless on survival - is now seriously contested.

My heart goes out as fully as possible to the demonstrators. Antenna up and on.
Go London!

This morning, and off and on all weekend, reading Trevor Joyce’s two ‘North American Tour’ Gig chapbooks, Undone Say, and, Take Over. I am mostly new to Trevor’s work. An Irish poet, I hear him read at the San Francisco State Poetry Center last Thursday evening. Here is what emerges this morning in my journal (where I still write on paper in cursive in ink!)
….

Trevor Joyce’s poems are so driven -
Similar to Tom Raworth and G.M. Hopkins, too, in that respect -
Propelled in search of a violation,
One in which the language yields
To a perception freshly born:

structures unseen the seen decide
you near space intervenes
gone head will conjure head the lid the lip
waking we share and sleeping turn aside
eyes twinned make the world deep

(from Saws)

Going there among the chosen or
Given materials (the Irish tongue, the ancient Chinese,
Or the local, familiar), unbinding each,
As if each line rhythmically slips away a veil,
Then another, layer by layer going down,
Until a revelation, an inherent shock
In the assembling words, the epiphany,
(in fact joy and delight) in realizing,
Taking consciousness of “what’s going on”
whether it be in love, nature or wherever:

Experience
will seize
the way.
Don’t fix
What ain’t yet broke
You’ve heard it’s true

that by a snifting
clack
the air
is expelled
from the
pickle pot

(from “3” of Undone - Please excuse any loss of the indentations of line in the printed version)

Yet not so much a “self record”
(I suspect that, too),
But a transfer to the reader’s ear/eye
Made keen to see, to hear:
A fleshed out truth to be carried,
Embraced by its music, indeed,
propelled amongst us:
A generosity for all (who pay attention, listen)

+++

If were to be critical of Trevor’s public reading style - when he read here - I would suggest his incredible delivery speed could be slowed down (very similar to that of Tom Raworth) – the relish in the language - sylable by sylable - would then be allowed to become more evident and elicit more to the ear.

Anyway, as The Gig (publishers) I am sure will be happy to hear, I suggest getting both these new chapbooks. For more detail, the email address is “ndorward@sprint.ca” or the publisher’s web site, www.geocities.com/ndorward/

Last March, the Gothics News Service reported (below) on the results of a National Purge and Shape Sculpture Competition. There have been no new updates on the progress on getting permits for the installation, other than some flimsy opposition from Utah’s US Senator Orrin Hatch and his recording choir. However, in light of tomorrow’s Bush/Blair reunion in Britain (protests et al) it seems important to reprint the original article:

World Leader Sculptures Planned for the Edge of Salt Lake

Salt Lake City, GNS, March 17, 2003. The National Purge and Shape Sculpture Competition has just awarded Salty Dog Productions this year’s prize for a proposal in which the winning artists will create salt-encrusted figures of President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The new sculptures will be sited on the edge of the Great Salt Lake.

In today’s press release, it is announced that “the sculptures, absolutely realistic in height and shape, will be composed of crystals filtered and hardened from a special processing plant that sits on a barge in the middle of the lake.

“The lake’s crystals, especially under full sunlight, are noted for the way they absorb, refract and distill translucent light in a manner described by many as ‘purifying.’ “

Salty Dog Productions - in a joint statement with the National Purge and Shape Foundation - declared that the sculptures would be located on a flat steel base on a beach within easy driving distance from Salt Lake City. Asked why the sculpture was not located closer to “Spiral Jetty,” the lake’s world-renowned sculpture by the late Robert Smithson, Salty Dog representatives indicated that they did not want to sow any visual or critical confusion with the other work.

“Our platform of the figures of Bush and Blair will only resemble ‘Jetty’ in the way the seasonal level of the lake’s water will also rise to cover the work,” Salty Dog Production said. “Occasionally, the public will not be able to see the figures at all. As the figures re-emerge, additional salt will have further encrusted their shapes to re-introduce another cycle of purification. It will be a process that the American and an International public can take years to witness and appreciate.”

According to the press release, site drawings and location will be released as soon as State authorities approve the plans and location and agree to provide all other required permissions.

Original documents are fundamentally disturbed. Or, I should say, I am fundamentally disturbed by original documents. I was very disturbed yesterday. My very fingers and palms lightly, and, I can perhaps say, tenderly gripped and turned the pages of trial records from the Inquisition as it was practiced in Mexico between 1593 and 1815. Let me say from this outset, I do not read Spanish and I have little formal knowledge of the Inquisition as it was practiced in either Spain or Mexico or Latin America. I had the minimal thought that this was something that Catholics practiced against Jews and crypto Jews. I did not realize that it also included Protestants, as well as individuals considered to practice witchcraft, clairvoyance, fraud, and unacceptable sexual acts. And that it was also used against members of the Church, particularly priests who committed acts of moral turpitude.

Beyond my “minimal thought”, the word “Inquisition” provokes a visceral sense of torture, an inside sensation of a person being burnt at the stake, possibly cruelly dismembered. As a person raised Protestant, it is an inarticulate apprehension of mysterious Catholic practices and powers that will vanquish one from your home and destroy any sense of power or self-worth. It’s a layer of sensibility that in a contemporary world feels itself to exist without rhyme or reason. It’s a paranoia ready to go off like a pistol or wrap itself around the body in a cactus with sharp pointed dark and yellow needles.

Yesterday, at the Bancroft Library, I was given the generous opportunity to hold and explore several volumes. Physically, the most impressive was a practically three inch thick volume – perhaps 6 x 8” volume - wrapped in a well-worn, deep reddish brown, leather binding. Closed shut by leather straps, one bound to a small, leather barrel-shaped knob around which the other straps are each hooked. Inside, the heavy weight, lightly saw-toothed, beige colored, rag paper leaves are loosely bound into a thick stack. The elegant text is carefully inscribed in black ink in level lines across the pages; there are consecutive paragraphs of unbroken prose, flourishes of signatures, apparently at the conclusion of different parts of the trial, or, at perhaps the submission of pieces of evidence. Various hands took turns inputting the record. Sometimes there is a series of pages with dialog in which the lines of inquiry – questions and answers - are clearly separated from each other. The only Spanish words I immediately recognize are “accusasion” as a noun, and “accusa” as a verb. The sight of either word causes an instant shiver. Instinctively one immediately knows “the stakes” as something more literal than the common the use of the expression for winning or losing.

The trial’s frontispiece spells out the accusation. A paraphrase in English is that
Isabel de Carvajal is being tried for heresy and practicing Judaism. The Spanish, however, translates as more embellished. Part of the heresy is her identification as a “lapsed Christian.” Not only that she has reclaimed herself as a Jew, but text also accuses her of “proselytizing,” meaning, I suspect, that she has brought other Jews into her home on Friday evenings to observe the Hebrew Sabath. But the actual details, which are no doubt fleshed out, word by word, in what the Library catalog counts as “400 leaves” – meaning 800 pages of inscribed testimony – do not (even if I could read Spanish) immediately interest me. It’s the fact, the materiality, the incredibly refined formality of the actual object – the reddish leather binding, the sheer balance and grace of the black cursive script: the sense and importance of making a significant, resonant container for the trial’s accumulation of facts, argument and resolution.

That formality is what disturbs me the most – that I experience its inherent beauty as an ultimate instrument of brutality. The Church clearly saw each of these trials as a test of its strength and belief and boundaries. Apparently it was not unusual for its Tribunal to acquit an accusd, and many times charges were determined as ridiculous. Yet I find it impossible to hold the book without both fascination and terror. The accused whose charges were proven were subjected to the worst fates imaginable. The sense of conviction in the record’s cursive script can be read – particularly in this case –as leading in only one direction. Lose the contest with Church Law and lose everything, including one’s life.

Both enthralled and shaken, similar maybe to the experience of holding a hangman’s well-knotted noose, particularly long after the fact of a specific hanging. It’s hard living these days – say in the light or I want to insist “the darkness” – in which both ancient and new laws are being tightly inscribed, here and abroad, border by border, most often against questionable physical appearances, gatherings, relationships and movements. Or when there is no law (no book), detentions without trials or secret trials, torture, instant assassinations. It’s curious what the original document stirs, disturbs. Why one wants to know it, be liberated by the touch and presence of it – its unspeakable alignment with history, a kind of radiance of the known - and the way one wants to walk or run away from it, prefer a blurred photocopy on slippery, disposable paper stock as a kind of dull mirror of the original, as if one also wants a complete liberation from the repetition of everything, particularly bad and murderous history. The way a hawk in winter perches on the crown of an urban tree.

Oakland? A Very Short Memoir
is the title of a piece I wrote for Vert, an on-line mag at:

http://www.litvert.com/oaklandmemoir.html

“The real poem is a giant at the start and a giant at the finish,” the well-known Filipina poet and dancer taunts the set. We are both looking at a tall giant, flattened to the stage floor. Not only flattened, but zippered up in a transparent, vinyl body-bag. “Further,” she says, “the giant poem is a living poem, up on its feet, vibrant, on the move, head to toe, which is to say, it is as much alive in the first line as in the last.”

I think I get her drift, that is, the killing character of the West, where the story, the poetic narrative, line by line, ploughs without mercy, down the last furrow, where it dies, down in the dust, useless. The giant dead on the floor.

“But look,” I say. I am down on my knees where I have opened the zipper to lean over the giant’s open and enormous head, the insides of which are diced up into little cubes, similar to egg plant, cooked through and covered with a sauce of olive oil, balsamic vinegar and flattened parsley. “Cooking,” I argue, “the sophistication of gourmet cooking is still an option.” I pause to look up into her eyes. “You can’t imagine how good this is going to taste and I am about to start!”

Erect, she looks down, commandingly, her legs spread wide, standing now silent and tall, there, at the foot of the giant, casting a hungry shadow on the new meal.

Writing: the act of turning objects into air.

Panels. Still and/or active, unfolding panels. A state of consciousness in which the eye and ear slide from one panel to the next, and back again, sometimes with a focus that holds two or three panels simultaneously. The elderly, deep red, alcohol weathered face of the accordion player on the corner of 9th & Judah. Ten o’clock in the morning, his hands squeeze the miniature, silver metal sides, in and out against the instrument’s interior red leather, bellowing folds. He walks in short, oblong loops, up and down the sidewalk, raises the ear to alert, the stride to a European melancholy, not native, a little odd to the City. Actually, says “Germany”, when asked. The sky is filled with sun and a little chill against the shadowed wall. No one, he also says, is offering money. A dollar folded, now planted in his hand.

Golden Gate Park: the early morning patterned groups of Chinese – many elderly, though not all, men and women – congregate variously under the Concourse’s wych elms whose limbs and remaining leaves further shadow the identity of yellow faces, though not entirely. I am facing a man with a long, unsheathed silver sword that extends to his right, then to the front. No expression crosses his thin, closed lips. Behind him, four women with open crimson fans glide in unison with his moves and pauses. The arms open parallel, the bottoms sink back against the flow of weight, pause at the heel, gather energy, release, and project forward, the spine erect and flat; back to center position, the arms join; the fans snap shut with an abrupt “clack”. An absolute poise in the closure, a pause, then, opening out again.

Panel to panel, the animal unfolds, leans back, shits, released, rejoices.

Culture smiles at mistakes. The instructor’s hand reaches out, flattens the base of the curved spine.

It’s night and the gypsy man is only a gypsy when he sings. His wheel chair sits at an odd angle adjacent to a blank industrial wall. We are somewhere in Spain, but not in Spain, but in a singular panel in a Hannah Collins’ video installation, projected on to a long wall in a University Gallery in Davis, California. It is one of five panels. Most of the time, each panel is full: an image of a black vested and suited man, a community elder, stands, elevating and lowering, an elegantly carved, vertical wooden staff, the wand through which he articulates and resolves local disputes. On the two adjacent panels, the disputants and their friends face each other, the tension is palpable, this is a dusty crowded street corner in a neighborhood with unpaved streets Down the wall, you see, from another angle, a panel in which a horse is drawing a cart, a young man leaning forward, guiding the horse, its hooves erratically clacking against street stones. The black of the horse, the black of the elder’s suit, the pale blue in the men’s summer short sleeve shirts, the tension between violence and pacification, to weigh and calibrate the violence of human chemistry, the work of compromise, a day’s act of judicial genius.

The man’s stark white shirt in the wheelchair against an industrial street light against an ink dark sky. His body slightly buckled, maybe to gather air to release the song, his hands loosely gripping and un-gripping the sidearms. It’s a lament that keeps gathering velocity. The man must be in his late thirties. “Mother, if you could see me now.” All is hopeless, except the violent force of the song, the shape of which is compelled from an insufferably deep place, his pink lips straining to keep the form barely managed, the darkness in his open mouth, at one point, a trembling trapezoid. It is the voice of mother loss.

The panel dissolves back to multiples, another light of day, the vanilla yellow color of housing project facades, each of the five at slightly different angles, the painted lines of the balcony rails, the bland architectural façade, becomes a structural, visual music, unfolding back to community, the young virgin seated inside the apartment, talks up to the experienced one, standing, her weekend marriage approaching; down the right, in another panel, the teenage girl, her carefully combed down, shoulder-length, bright blond hair, the tight, pearl blue tight slacks, on the threshold of her house, tip-toeing, lured and held back, the desire of desire, gingerly, stepping out into the dusty, red street.

A young man with the most beautiful, burn ravaged face: the white skin against blotched red, a perfectly waxed moustache, the combed hair, the poise of style against trauma; the trumpet he refuses to play, now nine years, since the death of his father, the weight and lure of the community, persuades, pushes, cajoles, until he raises the tarnished gold instrument, standing out on the street in the red dust, letting wretch a vibrato torrent into melody, an inevitable rebirth; his wife, children and friends in absolute awe, as I am, hands spontaneously shadow clapping in the mostly empty gallery.

Of which, there is another room, the work of other artists, one of whom is Danny Treacy. a Hannah Collins’ student, who also works in panels, that is, he collapses the panels into costumed self-portraits of his own body. The materials – “the panels” - found on the streets of London, mostly from acts of extreme sex and/or mutually inflicted violence. In one his head is enclosed with three separate, stonewashed jean crotch seams, each piece cut, sewn, joined into one; breathless, the image a baroque parody of a medieval Knight who cannot either see or breathe through his helmet. In another image, grease stained electricity resistant yellow and orange rubber gloves; on another, an orange rubber tank top vest, the sweet vagrant filigree patters on a transparent nylon dress collaged on to the empty portion of a torn jean. The life style is called “Doggin,” and it seems like the end, the absolute end of hope, bodies colliding, pushing death against hope, this is, at best, the City fiercely destroying itself at the end of civilization: the art work - torn panels of garment and dress that collapse and form around the body - a corruption of desire, the most mean desire imaginable.

Panels: Isolate time in one, spring forth two and three; split, oppose the dramatic personae in multiple panels, fracture one to a particular (the custom gold ring on the elder’s finger loosely gripping the staff), sustain incontiguous physical context (the unrelated singular man on the seat of the horse drawn cart), disperse time, conjoin time, disperse color, conjoin, shift panels, shift folds, the liquidity of images – to embrace all, to embrace one, (structural containment, structural dispersal), an aesthetic, a human, (blink, appear, blink, disappear), constant.

At one o’clock in the morning, the quick, repetitive loud, muffled sound and short echo: pistol fire, an estimated five or six shots, an absolute passion, madness or witless declaration. Absolute silence. Perhaps near the concrete building in the small L-shaped neighborhood park. Ten minutes of quiet. Not a voice. The singular ambulance siren. The abrupt stop. The moral ambivalence: to go see or not. Wounded or murdered. The unnegotiable absence. Shivered. Absolutely no report – grocery or radio – in the morning. The absence.

My “pretext” puts me/us at a loss:
Fidelity a belief in inarticulate Guidance,
Our moves up the Mountain – an igneous goal –
Black shiny surfaces – step by stride, spiraling up,
Forest and tree and valley view to the bare - lone for
The orange and chartreuse lichen - iconic basalt, multiple faced,
Occasional anthropomorphic, harsh, dark Buttes; the sweet
(well, maybe) sweat; aspiration, a slow glistening, or not:
“roof anguish,” a home in which, day to day, an un-bunkered life,
the eye perpetually looking, taking down the shaken “audibles”:
Apprehension, the loomed, threaded, stitched, clean light, fresh peach,
new Madrone limbs; Buckeye seed bulbs (those limb bearing,
gold skinned, grainy white, rain-washed, glimmering testicles),
or later, Friday night, in the Gringo bar, Calistoga Latinos without women, arms
tucking one another in beg of the nocturnal, not ever going to happen tonight,
straight-up in the sky, split down the middle, white moon, “touch me,” fix.
Meanwhile, back in the morning, hot, wet, black ash – eons, one realizes –
the mud breaks, gathers, swells: the body seethes within,
yet one more small, we still are, circus -
only the body, mine, yours, can raise this to a proposition -
the molten, rising, flame strewn - carry forth – channel to the sun.

Stephen Vincent