February 2002
by Richard Kenney
In Retrospect
In fact, what change? The chimney of the spine
still burned its gray electric fire, where neural
fibers rose in braids above the heart's narrow
perch and frayed as if to part and yet held on,
held on; and cool morphology the life had followed
followed after all; and still the mortmain rule
of intellect unturned traced out its lines
across a window grid where green glass flowed
like rain, light left, and night flowed out to dawn --
the heal-all. Shamans' art. What change? One hero's awful
pitch and roll unsteadied by such ancient arcane
warps as compass points, or twice twelve hours -- a fool's
abandoned pigeonholes, his handblown window panes ...
Sand-painting here erased, in retrospect, by arc-
Light
crack -- recall it vividly as first fabric
ripping in the distance, droplets that began
to spit my forehead and shoulders -- I sat with a broken
neck and watched the first summer thunderheads
leap up the valley to the west like hydrophobic
spirits, erratic, rushing, a thick boiling brailing
up the sky's last light, and the world in a black hood.
A curtain of wind came several hundred yards ahead
of the rain, laid down the wild lilac trees. I heard
as a baby hears, the crack and fall; clapped eardrums felt
like new skin. Cumuli like radioactive stone crushed
in and shocked the earth a half hour after nightfall;
still the air smelled hot, a river; all through it I crouched,
a glistening bat under a black umbrella.
Walk away from Omelas.