Wrist Deep

Stumbling barefoot onto the dew laden grass,
stars spread out like agates on an onyx field,
I dug my toes into the damp earth like anchors
in an undulating sea of darkness and deep, leafy green.
So still, it seemed, the sickness in the air, heavy
and pressing down from so high. How, I wondered,
am I less than crushed under the weight of the sky?
Burning like backlit phosphorescent desert eyes
each star blinked silently a different question
while night and I hushed down low to listen.

The power lines let out their warm dull buzz to answer
the cricket’s cool call. Cars passed in the distance.
All the urban concert whisked up my muddled mind
into question. Through what do you all travel?
What air? what body? where the trail? the wake?
Incursion of sound. Inflection of voice. Invisible waves
surrounding my body, delicate as pedals on water.
Spheres of music abound and spread throughout,
like soapy bubbles rainbowing incandescence,
begging to be popped, each in their own subtle way

like the dandelion clock waiting to be blown
into explosion, wanting to expel its seeds
dotting yellow flowers across the lawn.
How many stars have asked, in vain, for that?
only to shoot off bits of themselves, bloom,
become anew, at once reborn; bits of light
collecting, fragmenting, and coming back again;
spinning and turning into single dots of sick heat,
being more, tangled thread knitted up, set ablaze
filling space like a glove with bright fingers.

I raise my own in front of my face and glare
to see what light might break between the spaces
in my hand, trying to estimate the distance between
space and me. And reaching up, instead of rising,
I; desiding to sink, forsaking the stars and sky
said goodbye to the day. I do not need it anymore.
First my feet, sulking in the turf, covered. Gone.
My ankles, couriers of this much weight.
Shin-bones, calves, knees, sinking, also covered.
Things that once were me becoming so much less-so.

And more-so dirt: my eyes. Black and darker
than black, which is black still though it harbors
a stranger sound. The rocks cold and wet
and surrounded as I am cold and surrounded.
I held my breath. Roots at my fingertips,
I remember roots tangled like rings around my fingers.
The earth and I were married for a moment.
And the black became a comfort; light becoming a sting.
Warmth became the dirt in which I made my home.
I closed my eyes and went further into it and did not die.

Light moved mysteriously then. I close my eyes now
tight and still can see; indigo deep, maroon pulled light.
Streaks of sound that flashed across my dark, dark eyes.
Patterns of ragged teeth, checkered diamonds, beautiful
diamonds. I saw magic performed before me, women
cut in half, but really; bullets stopped in air, right there,
because I asked it, because I was in the ground.
Everything was changing in that place but me. The core
of the earth was calling me, and the stars. Somehow the stars.
I pointed my feet down and sunk farther to find them.

There are things moving through me that cannot be seen.
I am digging in to find them; between the atoms and electrons.
Ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of me is empty space.
I press the five points of my five fingers against me
and try to feel inside and sink only deeper through the places
between the atoms into that collective emptiness. There exists
a collective emptiness inside me. Like fabric I am woven,
at points translucent. Light has passed through me, made me glow
a red-orange sunset hue, the color of shut eyelids pointed
toward the sun—white center, red to yellow, and black. I am fabric

wrapped as if in jackets and sweaters. I am layered
deep within the earth now, passing lines of distinction
between times – epochs, periods, eras going by –
Cenozoic gone, mass extinctions gone, Mesozoic, Paleozoic
gone, going deeper, further back, eons, supereons,
and further. Life sinking into the oceans, gone;
the oceans leaping back into the rocks, clouds
sucked into the molten surface of the earth; at once
the moon pulling slowly toward me, being sucked in
as the earth remembers what it was like to be held;

as the planets unfold and become less-so balls of reflected light
and more-so rings—rings that might spread into a disk of dust,
brilliant dust, gold and violet, breaking up, turning violent.
And I am made of the violent thing, traveling through the thing.
Fourteen billion years ago the universe was born. I close my eyes
and try to see—a single point becoming everything, one light made all.
There is something hidden in everything; in the air, a sound;
in each sound, a wave; in each wave, a length, a distance.
Within the distance, space; the space between my fingers and the stars;
between my fingers and my face, the world which I must face.