Two lovers on a hill, standing and kissing.

Two other lovers in a car, upset, backing up their car faster and faster in a straight line, trying to run over the first pair, going up the hill backwards, top speed now, bearing down on the standing pair like a bull.

The car misses. Like a skier on a ramp, it’s launched smoothly into the air by the hill’s slope, its flight perpendicular to the earth. The standing lovers cheer, as you would a feat of archery or a skillful tennis backhand. The car, hanging in the sky for a moment, like an arrow shoots straight back down the same way it came, and explodes.

“What’s this?” the man asked.

-A blue glove.

“I didn’t ask for this,” the man said.

-But now you have me. Put me on.

“You don’t fit very well.”

-That’s all in your head. I can feel all of the skin on your fingers on all parts of me. So I know that I fit beautifully.

“I’m taking you off.”

-No, there’s work to be done.

“What work? What am I supposed to do?”

-Use me to climb the golden rope.

“The rope in the corner? You’re crazy. I can’t climb that. I’ve never been able to. I’m not strong enough, and it’s too slippery to hold for even a second.”

-Try it. Grab it.

The man approached the golden rope, flexing his bluegloved hand, and started to climb, not expecting to have any success. Amazingly, he found not only that he was able to grip the rope without slipping, but he could also pull himself up easily, without any weakening in his shoulders and arms.

-Now climb the rope.

“But the ceiling — the hole up there — am I supposed to climb through that?”

-Don’t be afraid, just follow the rope. All the way up.
The man paused, halfway up the rope.

“I’m taking you off now. This is too much. I don’t want to climb. I don’t want to be up this high. I don’t know why you’re here but I’ve had enough.”

-Don’t. You’re up too high. You’ll fall and break your neck.

“I’ll just climb back down then.”

-You can’t. Try it.

It was true. The man had no desire to climb down whatsoever. He found the choice totally repugnant.

“Well I’ll stay here all my life then.”

-Don’t be ridiculous. You have no choice. I’m telling you, climb, this is what you’re supposed to do.

The man was still for a very long time, clutching the rope. He didn’t get tired — something about the blue glove gave him the strength to hold on seemingly forever. The hole in the ceiling remained frightening, so he refused to climb. The blue glove seemed to sense his stasis, and knew further urging would do no good, so it stayed quiet.

Just then the man had an idea. He began to climb in earnest.

-Good. You’re doing what you’re supposed to. Now don’t stop. Stay on the rope.

As he got nearer the hole in the ceiling, man readied himself. Suddenly he launched himself from the rope, grabbing the edges of the hole with both hands. He pulled himself up onto the surface, the golden rope stretching up into the sky beside him.

-What have you done? Why didn’t you keep climbing? Get back on the rope.

The man didn’t answer. He was on the roof now, stunned at the view. Not once had he ever been outside of his house. He didn’t even know it was a house. Just a room with four walls and a ceiling with a hole in it and a rope hanging down which he couldn’t grip or climb. And now he was out, free for the first time.

The city stretched before him from horizon to horizon, a white carved heaving ocean of roof & dome & spire. Everywhere were houses, and every house had a cord connecting it to the sky: all the other golden ropes, stretching out from all the other roof-holes. The sky was amazing, connected to all the buildings with this constant golden-shimmering rain of ropes.

He felt everything in him ready to embrace this. He felt a complex ache of fear and sadness and joy in his heart that he couldn’t understand. He wanted to go back inside the house and yet he wanted to fling himself into the new world he saw.

Just then an old man floated up to him, dressed completely in yellow.

-So you’ve escaped. And for what? For nothing. This city is full of houses without doors or windows, and people trapped in them like you were, too weak and afraid to climb out. You’ll find nothing but emptiness out there. You should have stayed inside or climbed up the rope.

With that the yellow man seized the blue glove, and with it began to climb the rope, hauling it up with him and stuffing it in golden coils in a sack as he climbed. The man stared up after him and soon the yellow man disappeared into the clouds.

 (Read More . . .)

The red seed traveled thousands of miles. Sometimes clinging to a galloping horse’s hide, or living in a seagull’s belly, or just sailing across water on gusts. It crossed mountains, rivers, forests. Its little husk was powerful and never once cracked.

One day it settled in a man’s mouth. The man was sleeping and didn’t notice. His dreams were troubled that night.

In the morning he felt a pain in his heart.

“Who is inside me?” he called out.

“A red seed,” said the red seed. “I’ve come to live in you.”

“Why?” wondered the man in anger. “Who asked you to come? I never asked to have anything live in me. Get out.”

The red seed said: “I can’t. I’m buried too deep. Besides, you have been asking for me: In your dreams you’ve cried out for me for three consecutive nights, 13 days ago. I heard and so I came.”

The man was mystified. “I can’t control what comes out of my mouth in sleep! How can I be held to that? Get out now or I’ll swallow poison and kill you.”

The red seed remained still, and said no more.

The man drank bitter poison for the next 30 days, thinking to flush out the seed.

But at the end of that time, the man, very much sickened, could tell the seed was unharmed, and still made him home.

“Please leave,” asked the man, “I’ll do anything. I don’t want you to be in me.”

The red seed said: “I can’t, I’m sorry. I’m here as you asked, and meanwhile I’ve settled in quite nicely. This is my soil now, and I will grow tall and strong from within you.”

 (Read More . . .)

My tendons, sinews, wrinkles pop out in this light:

Articulated, discrete like the slats, dials, vents
of some chassis.

The hollow of my throat a vulva,
or the gutted cavity
of an upsidedown deercorpse.

My collarbone like ladle, stuck in mid-serve.

My forehead & scalp like a gleaming bronze bat
slapped against my skull.

Hair like long shrews plotting. Or tearing at flesh,
with the draining blood mottling down my brow.

I imagine them at night:
they clamber up & down my clay,
plot in my crags & creases,
leave lizard eggs in the folds of my ears as rent.

It’s time to go to bed. The more I watch myself, the more I don’t understand my biology, in the way a word repeated too much begins to sound alien. Already I don’t understand my shoulder, how its meat can hang on and mix with my bones, armpit, trapezius. So dissociated have I become that I picture, unflinching, what it would be like to pare back the skin, examine the fibers & ligaments.

My wife under the covers, does she ever see her body like this? Maybe not, but I think she does. Both of us watching our aging old-milk bodies curd and separate.

Do we have any yogurt-covered raisins left? Let me look. I could stick one in each ear, those are the lizard eggs. And I’ll paint little evil-red eyes up there for conniving shrew eyes. She’ll laugh in mild disgust when I eat the raisins, and chide me for my little vision later when I tell her what I was imagining. I’ll probably laugh too.

Then I’ll sleep and dream about what I always do nowadays: a white gauze curtain, so thin it’s like mist, flapping and twisting behind me, coy sharp dancing, water-splash-seductive, just barely in my periphery, lost in a shoal-dart as soon as I make the smallest move to watch.

There’s a stretch of overpass somewhere after 40th on the Westside Highway, from within a cab, at night, the wind in your face, the cool wind in your face bathing your eyes, where on your right launch these sudden things, planet things, high-rises and apartment-towers lit up and mysterious like glowing-algaed underwater obelisks –

& maybe you’re a little drunk, maybe you’re relaxed and dissolving into the seat a little during this stretch of overpass after 40th, at night, when you’re in the back of this cab and everything’s okay, the night finally over, everything settling in your brain like cool milk, like a soft cool hand on your hot forehead –

– five minutes, five little minutes where everything’s absolutely okay, nothing has yet happened and nothing yet will, a glad stasis, a waiting-and-not-waiting, a being, breathing in through your nose so hard your throat feels ice-watered, the wind in your face, on your skin, in your brain –

when come the sudden things,
the giant underwater glowing things,
the high-rises noble, dispassionate,
a little cruel,
like ancient statues,
bearing witness like olmec heads, like maori,

and you’re a boy again,
on a daytrip to the beach,
praying the car won’t stop,

the salt-sea smell in your nose,
hearing the shore grow closer, distant gulls,
tasting sandgrit in your molars,
watching power lines dip and rise, dip and rise,
wanting nothing to ever choke this perfect sleeping breath
of pure motion.

The Moss at God’s doorstep was rust-red and tall.

“When will his step fall,” it asked softly, in a voice like pigeon feathers rubbing together, “and press me together in glad compression? I’m almost grass now, wild and too tall. It’s hard to lift myself up.”

An ant was nestled in the Moss’s dense growth. “Moss, be careful please what you ask for. God’s foot will press you down, but me with it. You’ll grow back, blessed by his touch, but I’m afraid I’ll be crushed and won’t spring back so easy.”

But many years passed, and God never came. The Moss grew tired of the ant’s ceaseless fretting, and when it finally died one morning, the Moss was relieved. “Now God can take his tread and I won’t have to worry about that ant’s anxious cries.”

One night the Moss was startled by a huge thumping sound. God was coming.

He was not naked-footed, however, but shod in sandals. And so when he stepped on the Moss, tamping him deeply down, the Moss felt a great disappointment to his roots. He had wanted nothing between himself and God: certainly not some dirty shoe-sole.

Pressed low and lonely, the Moss pined for his old friend the ant, and felt a great sorrow. Time passed and he got worse, unable to grow new patches, bent low and aching. Soon he prepared to die, never having recovered from the disappointment of the sandaled step.

Just then he felt the soothing taps of small ant-legs, all over his body, and was astonished. “I must be hallucinating after having my old friend on my mind,” thought the Moss.

“We’re real enough,” said some newborn ants, happily. “We rode in on the bottom of God’s shoe, little eggs all of us.” And sure enough, hundreds of ants had hatched, making the dying moss their home. “Thank you for giving us a place to hatch. Now Goodbye, dear Moss.”

And with that the Moss died in peace. The ants went on to find another moss patch, one miles away from the house of God and near no one’s steps, sandaled or bare.

The swordfish was cutting a hole in the ocean.

“Why are you doing that?” asked the electric eel, who was trying to shock the sea.

“God gave me this snout, so I’m using it on the biggest thing I could find, which was the ocean.”

“But you can’t cut the ocean,” said the eel. “Nothing happens to it. You’re crazy.”

The swordfish, dismayed, stopped. “Then what am I supposed to do?” it asked. “By the way, all your shocking of the water doesn’t seem to be affecting it much either.”

The eel, taken aback by this, stopped and looked around. True enough, the blue was unburnt.

“Let’s try that rock,” said the eel.

The swordfish sliced at a piece of rock, and winced. “Ow,” he cried out. “It’s useless!”

The eel zapped the rock three times, only to find it completely unharmed.

“Let’s try the sand,” said the eel.

The eel scalded the sand, but gave up after not a wince or cry was evinced from it. Next, the swordfish dipped his snout into a drift, finding the going easier than with the rock, but still not very satisfying. “It works, but then the sand just fills it back in.”

Just then the eel and swordfish eyed each other, as if for the first time. They shifted and readied, as if to rush into each other. And with a burst, each fled in opposite directions, the swordfish to his grotto, the eel to his coral pile.
 (Read More . . .)

I remember the juice’s vivid stains all over the cutting board, finding dried droplets days later around my white stove. It was a messy first eating, I didn’t know what I was doing. I gave myself up to clawing and gouging out the little seeds like jewels or eyes.

It’s become a kind of careful surgery for me. The prodding, coaxing a seed-cluster from the snug membrane, itself like a birth sac. But sometimes I get impatient and take bites, membrane and all, and just use my tongue to push out seeds and spit out the rest. It feels cannibalistic to eat one sometimes, like I’m violating something. Other times I feel like I’m privy to secrets just by looking inside one, groping for the right spot to nudge out a seedbundle. Then it’ll hit me, this mild awe that I’m privileged enough to be let into it, the spilling red, the little white partitions, the sweet roe, the delicate seed-sanctums.