print previewback JOEY KINGSLEY
Limits of the Burning World
Fall piles: the tires, black holes under his lit sneakers
as he runs in & out of them, sweating in the farthest corner
of the yard near an embankment, the edge of the world. He hears
nothing. And in the magazine open on the kitchen counter,
an article about “The Beehive Archive” advertises Utah,
a few of John Muir’s lines—going out, I found, was really going in—over
the image of a waterfall—foggy & galactic, a hosanna,
a kind of rush like the scent of someone not forgotten. October:
upstairs, the door slams. Sometimes, when you squint in the middle
of a street at night, you can almost convince yourself it’s flat.
Muir, inspired pilgrim, knew rare flowers. And how they are riddled
with poisons: red poppy, lady slipper & poinsettia—stems that
burn a little, the dark, bright leaves grown with water, heat
& hands. Over the old tires, the boy falters. He carries these.
~
As if the flowers the boy carries will kill him by degree,
I can’t tell him the world is not flat—back when I thought it was,
we listened to Automatic for the People and tried not to breathe.
But, riding my bike through pigeons on side streets, the fuzz
of autumn light warms the old brownstones, more body than
anybody. In high school, I studied cells & ate sour gummy worms until
my lips stung, two half-limes stuck on the rim of a soda can.
And because the slam of a door can’t fill—
if you are going out, I am going in. The month sounds October,
tinfoil leaves in the streets & squirrels clawing gutters. The last
of the ale is a waterfall, salt spray, & I want to squint, sober,
at the white mist falling into the magazine’s spine so fast
that it becomes the gray of the boy’s arms as he skips in a dance—
his body mostly water, as impossibly dark & mutinous as his hands.
~
And the earth: mostly liquid. Our bodies, mostly water, small continents,
are mutinies, fractured within it. My desires are peninsular—like the boy
at the edge of the world, I want more, further & faster. Balance,
grasshopper. This month is a piano waltz: vines of slow light coy
in tandem, turning red to wine, lime to yellow. Muir knew
there are numerous ways to tell. The syllables at the ledge of the lips
kazoo yellow & black, hum in the drowsy daytime, a few
round on the tongue. Say October. When sun bleaches the houses white.
Say you have to want so much of it because you deserve so little;
you desire absence, the comfort, heavy & light. Enough. Too much.
This is every-day-danger. For instance, the boy running with flowers fills
his hands with them & is not poisoned, & so there must be beauty in such
risk. Once, I spilled a bottle of rat poison in my eye & my mother
held me under the faucet’s spray until I gasped like a fish.
~
Glance at the neighbor’s house; the sinking light bathes my face. Love
can be a kind of torture that saves. Already it’s made this side of the street
another world entirely. We learn first to drink with our eyes. Move,
I say, get going. October’s thirty-one days. You can make tea,
make work: plenty of brown sugar & cream. Still, the time
before beckons like an old vest hanging in a closet, a sheer blouse
or a tie looped around a hook. I would like to throw a dime
into the air & catch it on my tongue. And if my tongue, a flat house
roofed with syllables, became cold or hot as metal, I could speak
without feeling bankrupt or bereft. The elephant’s
skin never forgets. Warm & coarse, October’s tweeded neurons eke
out territory: blood, sweat, roots. The skin deadened,
though the site map under it feels the body shift, electric turns,
joints of a machine. Looking is pleasure. The world burns.
~
Because space is a vacuum the lost stare into, let’s disagree. The galaxy
is a primitive engine, bolted & edged gears locked together
to grind through days. I felt yesterday like I knew exactly
how to time this magical thinking. Have I not the love of leisure?
The will to play pretend? Forgiveness, always after the fact—
its space stretches, as grace begets more & more of itself,
the starlight receding further & inward. It’s an act
of raking yourself into yourself without an end in sight. Today, I dredged
up from the trash—egg shells, shredded carrot—a receipt I crumpled.
Happy returns! I go out of my way to leave the house.
In the brittle light, there are things too delicate to admit or mumble
aloud. For instance, I won’t say, I will kill to live, though I might. No ruse—
words fail most of the time. My daily worries are about
balance, so I say walk, all of us lost, pilgrims of doubt.
~
Is living an honest life a kind of balance? This one counts,
a friend told me years ago, over & over. He’d chanted prayers,
lulled so that the words in his throat, their sounds,
rose like balloons & bystanders thought him mad, murmuring over
nothing, into a steady grace they didn’t recognize. And this matters:
always we’ll refuse the sacred, beg for home
although we have lost it. And if my terse
negotiations of space are any indication, our private worlds don’t
make us any less in need. And, really, this reminds me of that
book—the protagonist excuses herself from the table & faints,
distracted to the point of revelation, & wakes up like a cat
in sunlight as, here, I put my faith in heartbeats & breath & it taints
everything October, its hush, its trees lit & kneeling.
When I examine the halo around the front door, I see that it’s peeling.
~
Sometimes, I find a bird by the front door, neck small
as an infant’s wrist. So often tenderness lies at the heart
of even the saddest gifts. And after I scoop its limp, mauled
body into a grocery bag, I make a shallow bed in the yard,
hiding it from the paws of a stray. Last October, after class,
one of my students started to cry & snapped a photo of a dead jay
with her cell phone & said, It’s still beautiful. Lost in the past,
I agreed. Its feathers fluttered in the breeze. The girl was violated.
She asked if her paper flowed. Like a waterfall, I said, peering
at her as if she were a moth stuck with pins. What could I say?
The wind, whipped cord, hurt me & I couldn’t shake it away.
Sometimes, words don’t unpack space. Perhaps, fearing
tears, I looked past her. I can’t remember. By now, I hope
she is a galaxy, a blue light lathering the earth like soap.
~
My sister’s postcard arrives: the Blue City in Morocco
where she’s been hiking trails of mountains that rise in twos
like goat horns butting sky. The icehouse tunnels & streets below
cast in a calm, gray light open not unlike the views
that surround the city. There’s a milk-glass moon, she writes,
washed by rain. Nothing’s clean. Even the builders’ wives
curse the loom where they comb, warp & weft, the quarry sites
where earth from earth means walls, stem cells, hives.
In the cemetery where I sit now, the grave of a stone cutter
bears a coiled vine, his green bridle. Bring on the ghost horses,
I think. Through the shifting light, a gang of gnats flutters
like so many sunlit dust particles. In October, necessity forces
the screens into closets before November’s starrier coldness,
days too short to hang up frames or jot down this address.
~
Invisible city! Perhaps we build things up in our heads
just to break them. Someone told me I’d fall in love
with the idea of a man & spend the rest of my life wedded
to the reality, but I find myself in love, instead, with these doves
in the backlit trees by the shoulders of the highway at dusk,
branches bare & open as though stripped of meaning
by sundown. Streets wind without stop signs—everything’s closed—
& the storm’s cries carry in the way that, underwater, whales sing.
In October, a light dusting of snow appears to disappear, equal
only to a white city where the lights in every room of every building
blink & flicker like the eyelids before sleep, all the people
in bed with lovers & children & themselves, living,
alone in the places they protect, have made & mapped
inside them. I can’t help it. The body’s engine’s automatic.
~
October: dendrite limbs inside their dressings,
apostrophic shadows against them, the bark possessive.
Crossing a street, the gusts sweep away the veil hanging
between myself and myself: a small window, open & alive,
a cardinal perched on the ledge. I turn, and back again.
It’s like passing by a mirror and swiveling to check that
you are whole, as you imagine yourself to be. Only, you’re in
the reflection looking out and you see yourself at
an acute angle, as others see you—embodied, wanting;
then just as you are. And who is not more than beams against
matter, the fracture of units of energy? Who claims to sing
of October’s nomenclature, the subtractions
of space? If I stick my hand out the window and wave,
my fingers rippled as a white flag, will the damp air part & save?
~
In a fallen world, unlimited possibility. White water
is the current of blue that feeds it. All good paths lead to water,
the pitcher would tell you if it could speak, as it does per
a chipped mouth in my fist that tips toward the augured
leaves. October: silver shingles, ghost train coming on the blue
whistle of sky, all I can see from here. How naturally I lift to my lips
whatever I can fill my hands with, sugar & bread slipping into
grain. Feel the torque of ceramic handle, the dip
of sunlight through their stoma as they drink:
leaves pearled & shot through with bamboo. October’s elocution,
quick tongued, a ghost slamming the door, an echo pressed in
amber & fixed at the hinges. Behind me is my other self, a split-second
shuffle in the daily watering. Lonely-content is like this:
so dilly-dally, so get-on-with-it, so don’t-hold-your-breath.
~
Don’t hold your breath: everything is moving away from us
even while the unwritten approaches. Today, I sweep ashes
toward the door, a migraine’s discordant hammer of Nonsense
spitting hail-fire through my left retina. And between the dashes
rain connections that open out like a breezy toll road of veins
into the city. And because my temple beats a drum of smoke that white—
objectified, the only consistent thing—rings in bright pangs
behind my eye, the telephone wire between my ear & mouth (the site
of an invisible curtain) is cut off. Clapping. Thunder. Rain begins
to beat on the roof. Lamps flicker & like the line that seeks what the mind
forgets, stains recall the ceiling like stars, new rings,
desire tentacling to satisfy desire. And where the paint reminds
itself to crack, water gathers, an old wound. Don’t wait for me,
I say to no one as the first street lights come on & we leave.
~
The hours fall through themselves, each geocentric as the first
model of the universe (earth at the center), as here, the prow
of a single ship, I cross to the porch where like a thirst
for salt, steam rises from hot asphalt after rain. Now,
the street opens, humidity close as fuzz to wool,
a dampness clings. October rises. Its musk forgets
the men in plastic buckets, gloves & cables in hand, who pull
back from Nothing the electric power lines tangled as nets
after the storm’s rush & batter. At noon, I order a poinsettia
& the tinkle of ice rattles in a hard burning of cubes—
a beautiful woman’s bangles, all scarlet & gold rosette,
knock on the bar so the ice spiders into continents—
new orders of silence, ways to be alone. I think of the boy
who rakes into hills the leaves, debris, & tires he’s meant to destroy.
~
As though it were meant from the beginning to fill with fire—
Now I’ve written the whole thing, for Christ’s sake,
give me a drink—the neighbor’s lawn burns higher
than the porch so the windows flicker, the air’s rippled lake
like sunlit oil, pools of gasoline & whimpers of heat
licking the sidewalk, cattails of fire, catcher & captured
coiled like static in a bad wire. And there, the boy greets
his father, rolling each grooved wheel of rubber tire toward
the burning mouth of the blaze. Sisyphus watched the shadow
of the boulder roll toward him, day after day,
the inevitable waterfall back to earth: a kind of final, low
groan. The fire alarm sounds & the sirens seem to say
Move, move, move. October is this. The wood burns
for the fire, the father says, & the fire must give back.
~
The hours fall through themselves, each geocentric as the first
October, dendrited limbs inside their dressings,
but don’t hold your breath. Everything is moving away from us.
Today, my sister’s postcard arrives: The Blue City in Morocco—
invisible city! Perhaps we build things up in our heads
because space is a vacuum the lost stare into. Let’s disagree. The galaxy!
In a fallen world of unlimited possibility: water
& the earth, mostly liquid, our bodies (also mostly water), small continents.
Glance at the neighbor’s house; the sinking light bathes my face. Love,
as if the flowers the boy carries will kill him by degrees,
fall leaves a heap of tires, black holes, under his lit sneakers.
Sometimes, I find a bird by the front door, neck small—
is living an honest life a kind of balance? This one counts,
as though it were meant from the beginning to fill with fire. 
Limits of the Burning World