First Movement (The Burning)
This is how doors close: a car parked for years flees its asylum. Quits the void. Light trickles through chinks in the horse’s stable. The moment the car finally budges, a magnified face peers down from a billboard. It is raining on the fresh departure and the huge red mouth, on the intense sad face. The driver wonders about the woman on the billboard. That profile reminds him of someone. Streaks of lighting. A hill in the distance. In the car, he’s aggrieved by tangible things: he can’t quite tune the radio, he finds a wet book on the seat. It smells like dank soil, like wood, like his mother’s clothes that he brought home from the hospital. It smells like something exceedingly human while, on the hill, a bolt of lightning sets fire to an elm. The tree is a poem and, like him, an intelligence that hurries to its feet, erect. The flaming hill sets the horses loose. Stroboscopic thoughts of the man watching the fire from his car: With this rain crystals fog up, I’m lost in my mother, maybe I’ve got a dog’s heart, like I thought before she died, this car smells like her, like she’s alive in a wet book, that woman on the sign is familiar, that nose, forehead—do I know her? As the window lowers, fog seeps out, as if from a steaming kettle, and in the haze are faces, countless windows, the cracked billboard, the elm’s red hot stump. A word stampede is carbonized. Behind the stables where his car was parked, where something is still happening, the gilding of light, still, still. In the past, a
long neck, a head that balances a pair of sad eyes, trotting horses, the radio tuned to a boleros station, and a book in the attitude of being read. It’s like that, even now.