11/11/06 draft

Once, when my eyesight was clear enough
to see each discrete vein in each leaf,
I lacked the need for mediums by which to grasp things,
but during a power outage, I was helpless as an infant,
except that my legs carried me from wall to blind wall
and my fingers fumbled for the match and the butane lighter.
That reminds me that balls of methane can be planets,
autonomous and lighter than a feather, weightless but fixed.
In an outage, I flicked a single match upon the floor
and thought about the fires I set in trashcans as a kid,
but as a bank flared up outside a Transcendental Meditation Center
I cowered, and reined the fire in by stepping on the growing flame with a single boot-heel
until only a smouldering column of smoke scarred the hillside.
A ball of methane can become another planet as easily as breathing or blinking,
but within another blink, such a planet disappears from sight.
The purest flame can come from putrifaction, oils that seep from lower earth.
The bluest methane could be the only light in a power outage
against which the lights of candles in blackouts falter.
The bluest orbs rise above the moon from putrifaction.
But a blink can change the earth and moon on their axis,
and in just a blink an orb of blue called a planet can be gone.
Mars is ruddy rock, not a valley in sight.
The faces of moon-men dissolve beneath the clearest glass,
the hollows of high cheekbones become craters and the facial lines canyons.
With the flick of a match in an outage, all becomes fire.
The orange cranes ascend the transfer stations
among streaks from sodium lamps on windshields and traffic stripes
and the planets of ammonia spin rings that freeze what touches them.
And the yellow planets are flammable, and the outages silence the village
but the rings around the planets are freezing cold, and the blue orbs insubstantial but fixed--
their center is as viscous as blue slush, and in a blink a planet can be gone,
can be deemed to be planet no longer, an orb for which a name is required.
I burned the contents of the trash receptacle,
and the flames licked the sides of the pole and blackened it
and leaped from the mesh basket. The trash was fire,
the fast-food wrappers and the empty boxes.
You could smoke in classrooms then, turn your insides black.
If you were busy your insides were dark as a combustible engine.
The linings of your insides as black as empty suitcases or engine blocks.