Grandmother Spider Takes the Sun
The condemned can at least be thankful
For the beatific fire that will course through his mind.
When the electric chair squeezes his eyeballs from their sockets,
They will dangle against his face like bungee jumpers,
And for the first time in his life he will see his cheeks.
And who would not sip the sun
From a mess of smoke and leaves, or fungus,
Siphoning it out with a pipe,
And burning away the skull’s confines?
(My mouth is always black in the morning,
Until Tongue slips into a crevice
And brushes up against a dozing canker sore,
Shocking the flesh awake.)
The Cherokee say that when the world was dark
Grandmother Spider built a web around the earth
And stole into the land of light.
She smuggled back a piece of sun,
In a great clay pot, to subdue its glare.
I once saw a woman poking a hole in the night
When she lit a cigarette against the edge of her palm.
But where is the tangerine breach in an unlit murk of intestine,
The back of a sleeping eyelid,
Or a knot of thrumming brain-crannies?
(Until one great trellis of scalpel-thing cries
…………………………………………………………………………………………LIGHT LIGHT LIGHT
Through rent reams of skin,
Or benthic shafts of light
Pierce the eddying strands of iris
And bring the sun back to the eye-deep,
Like a surgeon sheathed in cyan latex
Cleaving through cornea,
Or someone twirls that same sun around their mind’s eye,
Tangling it around the earth and into the air,
So that one clicking keyboard-dance of plastic friction
Can melt across the world, oil on a sea of sun,
Pulling all those eyes together
Like that last rapturous compression of plutonium before
The bomb goes off.)