If in this sleep I speak it's with a voice no longer personal. Adrienne Rich When I was ten my mother lit the burner on the kitchen stove I remember seeing the crisp blue flames from where I sat and how I startled when a lumbering moth crackled in a swift puff. She used to tell me how moths would fly into a candle's flame, but I had never seen anything die that way. So I asked her why it flew into the fire. She told me it liked the light. I wondered years later after I felt the bump of a desert hare beneath my car one night wondered what it thought of the two bright lamps moments before the weight of them passed over its body. It was the eyes I remembered, darting toward me the bright panic, blind yellow. And one day there was talk of men on the moon. I was watering my marigold seeds when I saw a rocket on the television, counting down to liftoff. A book I read said the fear of flying was really the fear of sex, the fear of the fuselage erecting, of it holding, the fear of falling. I think of that now. How could they not have been thinking of that giant straight thing And the power of the blast: loud white noise? After, when I looked down, I saw the white-green tip of a marigold pushing up into sun passing through the curtain. I think if a scientist could explain the inert seed cracking into space stirring from sleep into a jagged mouth of light then I could say that the light we follow pulls me for that reason too, how one day I came to sit at the helm of a ship pointing toward the sun. It must have been like this before seeds moving from womb to womb one dark space opening into another. The light is brighter here than I had expected the clouds are not as soft. But the edge of heaven is blue.
Back to the CSUN home page.
Warren Wedin warren.wedin@csun.edu