Man Without Air No longer a young man, I trudge the tarmac, my son in my arms behind his eyes a crystal taken from the head of a hawk with one knife thrust/ a twist & a pull-- luminous point pressed to his mother's belly as she gave him to the dawn (2 Monads dividing in vagitus tumbling apart now speeding into the void) that crystal--AZOTH--glows in his brain the clean intelligence frozen in flight like an osprey in a block of ice. It's so hard to walk the grid Descartes plotted in delerium/ nothing to hold me to the earth but the weightof my desire. Future/past square within square & circle within circle convince me that beyond the earth's curve is a wedding of sun & moon the Golden Animal in dance mountsthe Silver fits perfectly until they are through: jazz in the night Angel Midnight stops judgement. No Satan riffling thunder like a deck of cards but a feast we are invited to/ catch the dark garter father mother son & daughter no christ wiping bloody handprints on the wedding dress no thumbprints of aboriginal blood on the invitation but we, in perfect silence, ingest the body of the alphabet. Walking in rain over a hidden desert blooming prickly pear & cacti become Wide and Soft embracing Angels with faces like shoe leathertears of clear, bright stone I stop, let my son stand in my shadow he is afraid trembling underlip until he steps into sunlight hears a crow call 3 X / now he hurries to the Angels they surround him whispering the News. It is as if a man could keep going without breathing air could build a world/fit it in a trunk/bury the trunk in the side of a Mountain/ & when the trunk's uncovered & unhasped unborn generations would see a light-filled treasure, no crystal skull of dark inversions/ clattering of sinful teeth but a tree that is a dead man's arm, each thew, each sinew moved by a separate breeze each breeze a thrumming wire nailed to an angle inside the trunk a village beneath the tree, huts the color of dust, & dolls hung by their chests from thongs & hooks. All visions distilled in the fire of future times (hot war burning the guts of the Great Man) into this diorama: the original American Testament invisible hands will not let this world be taken as a museum piece/ the dolls cry without mouths to the Watchers in their towers while the man who keeps going without breathing air could tunnel out the other side of the world perhaps bathe his forehead in cool rain but chooses instead to rumble under the shopping malls tip the sidewalks at crazy angles rattle the diamond panes of mortician's windows shake skyscrapers like accusing fingers at the clouds, saying: "If you could count my words on your pulses if you could sing these words to passersby who shield their eyes from your face with dark glasses if you could walk with your children in the city yet know the earth stretches out all around you if you could sit all day in the heat without a job without hope & without bitterness if you could stand on the top of a cliff without leaping off with the 7 devils inside you but teach those devils to carry you through the air to Quetzalcoatl's side if you could catch rainwater in a jar & watch the land precipitate from the water the water become air & tender worms graze on fungi like the beasts of the Peaceable Kingdom & know that one shake of your wrist could send it all back to chaos yet resist that movement then a New World will come, perhaps & all things will remain yet all things will be changed." I am the Man without Air. I hold my son close & Look into his eyes. What I see there ends this vision.

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