Jesus kissed the dust,

Jesus had dirty feet -

He smelled like a camel,

His eyes didn’t sleep

but they had great black rings around them.

He knew the first sin,

Hands on his hips, laughing at the sun-

Adam? he thought to himself,

I’ll do it even better.

He’d slept on a mountain, he’d looked for God,

But there were wood shavings in his eyes and nose,

Only his father,

His mother,

Sometimes an old priest

Rambling about the good old days.

I’ll bring it back, Jesus whispered

Confidentially,

Eyes lowered,

I know how.

From the empty, heavy, dusty Egyptian air

He yanked nothing, he took it in his hand,

Just so much wind,

And he said,

“I am the Word!”

It was the truth, he -

And his fellows -

They were the Word

So he must destroy them.

He could have been forgiven,

Just for saying it first,

Just by showing them the nature of the truth!

But he twisted it, out of all proportion,

Like all great truths.

The Word came to Judea like a hurricane,

Destroying homes and ideas,

Trailing blood in its wake,

It said, “I am the Word!”

And it added:

“-and only me.”

Jesus was happy to die

For his fantastic lie.

Hung up on the cross he saw

For years and centuries

The men that would never know-

and for that, they deserved their lives,

Their slow misery,

The hell they trusted so fondly.

Jesus had been there a long time ago -

But he was a snake then,

Just a clever animal,

Cursed for being better than a rat.

A moment flits, fast and away

Over a distant hill, the moon;

But there remains

The shadow of its presence.

It shot like a star across the sky,

It came and went,

But it never left-

I still see it, like a crumbled wall

When a tsunami has blown it to bits.

A moment, the indivisible,

The not-to-be thought of -

Because I am incapable of

Thinking so small -

Is a quark,

A fraction of a particle.

Under a lens, it may not make a difference

Not to stocks or stomachs or broken roofs.

But I’ve heard that every quark in an ice cube determines the pattern of its crystals.

An ancient poet once called all things fire. He was describing characteristics using the only terms possible to him, trying to understand.

Poetry is a rhythmic relationship established between word to transmit a specific idea.

A poem is personal and specific, because it the idea of a single person. He may believe everything comes from fire, or that the clouds are like smears of white paint. Whatever the case, that original instance of understanding belongs to him.

It comes from and resembles the poet's own cadence, so it has rhythm. Ideas have harmony and integrity, so the poet must organize words and emphases in their appropriate places. This is the poet's beat.

It is transmittable, because everybody has a beat. Poetry does not bring an idea down; it lifts its audience into itself. Poetry makes choristers of commoners, with the poet as the conductor.

How many times had I seen him at the bar, next to a friend, hanging around, a loose smile, eyes staring at nothing distinctly, seeing me, but not really? So it didn’t have to matter. I knew in a moment that it wouldn’t matter.

I can’t remember if we drank. That’s the only hazy part. I assume we did. I remember everything else afterwards shamefully well. We took a cab his house - a mess, dirty dishes and scraps and filth smeared in gobs from one corner to the other. We walked past it quickly to the bedroom, where we laid down on his mattress on the floor. We should have fallen asleep, that would have been more honest, but I was young, and so was he, and I was careless and vigorous, and he seemed fundamentally dispirited because of his contact with the world. His eyes yawned at me that nothing would have changed, had he never been born. What a dull thing it was, to have been born. But then my mouth was against his neck, and when I looked back up, his eyes were suddenly fearfully aware that he had indeed been born, and there was some danger here.

I gently, but deliberately, made it clear that I intended to leave the marks of my lips on his body. He didn’t want me to. A lover past had held those marks as a private distinction and remembered me fondly for them. I thought that lover, while I was pressing my lips to this creature that didn’t want them. He didn't stop me, but he was steadfast in his caution. When I reached a limit that he could recognize, he pushed me away from it, and though I created new and intimate strategies to touch those borders, still he resisted. Otherwise, he didn’t seem to care, not for me, himself, or anything at all.

It ended quickly, dispassionately. It was an end for me. It was a false start for him. I can’t remember if I fell asleep next to him; it wouldn’t have mattered if I had. But at some point, there was the soft morning light, the recognition that I had anywhere but there to be. I departed quickly, feeling like I’d left something there that had no right being there, and no right to be left by me. Whatever that thing was, what was left in its place was a heavy, enduring feeling of regret. The regret I would feel a few weeks later at the same bar, seeing him again, seeing him look at me like a deer in headlights, seeing him shrink away like a man caught fishing illegally for the sea monster that was to devour him, and being asked a question that he never thought to ask himself, but was of vital importance: why on earth are you here?

The sun was too bright. It filled every corner in the house, somehow highlighting the stink of dampness and age.

Wandering from the kitchen to the living, and peering with squinting eyes out the window, Jody hugged her robe tighter about her shoulders. There was no draft in the house. The warmth from outside had permeated the walls and made the temperature miserable. Jody felt like she should take a shower and leave.

But she hadn't left in so long, not really. What did that mean? She had gone yesterday for a few groceries -- a couple of cans of corn and some oatmeal. But she didn't really leave yesterday. She didn't see who she handed money to, or even care whether they took it or handed her change. There were so many automatic motions for her, it was easy to disregard the details involved in making them. That was her routine for most of the past decade.

Meanwhile, the house had gone untended. Weeds rolled up the exterior walls, at first hiding behind the bushes, and then all at once up to the banister, practically shouting their existence to the world. The porches hadn't been swept of pollen for several years, so this year's explosion could settle undisturbed on last years blanket. Wisteria climbed up every tree in the yard, and all across the little plot of land.

Jody yawned and closed the blinds in the living room, and dropped herself down into an armchair. There were memories here. They were embedded into the fabric of the chair as surely as if it had been made that way. Jody had trained herself not to remember them, not to react to them or to anything else. If that was the only way that she could go on living, then she would. A steady heartbeat came at the price of what was once a bursting capacity for living. She held on to her steady heartbeat, because it was the only thing she knew she had.

Her jagged lines flash across the sky;

Her rage is palpable-

I can't help but smile.

The leaves are singing to me

The sweet lullaby of my fathers,

The whispering they heard in ditches

and trenches.

A bitter chill sweeps my face,

I barely feel the rain

As it drips off my chin,

As it flows in little rivulets away

Someplace beneath the soil.

She lays underneath,

Claws outstretched,

She only knows the taste of my sweat-

I outrun her yet.

It sits on my chest. It holds my body down.

I know I try to call to J-, but I can't move my lips. I can't flail. I feel him sleeping next to me, but I can't reach him. What is that? I can't see it -- but I know it's there, I know it breathes close to my lips -- I know it smiles at me through the darkness. I don't know what it's after. I never do.

When I dream, I can move. I can speak. I have conversations with lost friends and old family members. We laugh, and we love, and we reconcile. But this is different. This is nothing that I know. I have nothing that it wants. But it comes for me. It comes when I'm restless, when I'm having trouble falling asleep, when the shadows in the corners of the bedroom begin to change and look like strangers, when I feel estranged from the world. It rests there on the outskirts, waiting for me to get close enough, to keep my eyes closed long enough.

And then it's on me. Is this kind of what rape is like? To have your most private possession -- your functioning, reasoning mind -- ripped away from you, without even knowing the nature of your attacker? Is that fear, just to not understand?

I spend the first half an hour and 25 miles of my drive to work on wide open country highway.

I’ve timed it. From my house to where I turn onto Salley Road, it’s about two minutes out of town, with a winding cruise past a farm and a couple of abandoned houses falling ever into disrepair. From the point of turning, until I hit the end of Salley Road where I turn onto Wagener Road, it’s 10 minutes — almost to the second. 10 minutes, a few songs, a cigarette, the darkness of dawn that precedes a new day.

When I turn onto Wagener Road, I know that I have 20 minutes (again, to the minute) to get to East Pine Log Road, which I pass to come into downtown Aiken, where Wagener Road becomes Richland Avenue (and I’ll stay straight for the next 25 miles). Wagener Road is 20 minutes of the first pink, tired rays of the sun, the rolling hills and scattered forest, a fork of the Edisto River and a couple of creeks, two sharp turns that I don’t slow down on, even though the traffic signs warn me that I should. But the road itself bids me on ever faster. Not to get to my destination sooner, but just to enjoy the expanse more fondly.

Downtown Aiken is just like any small city’s Downtown — charming, with big shop windows and lots of colors and foliage. That’s probably a mile across, and then I start getting up into highway speeds again, but it’s different. Here is the hustle and bustle of life, the tell-tale signs of civilization: grocery stores in strip malls, billboards, apartment buildings. I’ve entered the world of adult business. But in the previous paradise of backwoods mystique, I’ve expanded my consciousness. I’ve let my mind caress the trees for miles around. I’ve flown at 55 miles an hour with the birds and the deer, and I bring them with me onto the harsher pavement of the businessman’s world.

I feel like an ocean, stretching for miles, canvassing the whole of the countryside with my body, and then trickling like one of those many streams into what is simply a different mode of existence. But my personal style is the same: flowing, babbling, pleasant and cool. An ocean and a stream have works to do; they have canyons to carve out, lands to grind away, ships to sink.

I have a work to do, too.

I switch to “Park” anywhere between 7:25 and 7:40 a.m., which, unless I’ve stopped at the gas station, is exactly an hour from when I left the house. I make my customary loving text to my boyfriend that I’ve made it safely, and I hope he has a nice day.

I enter my office and turn on the lights, feeling nonetheless powerful for my walls.

A man can’t out-think the world, and he can’t outrun his twilight.

You'd think sometimes that he was God hanging all the stars in they sky.

But he was a dawn that was ever too short. If his day ever came, he probably didn’t notice it.