ecstasy

EcstasyAuthor(s): Erica HuntSource: The Iowa Review, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Summer, 1996), pp. 105-106Published by: University of IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20154275 .

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Erica Hunt

Starting with A

She passes through pockets of warm air in a cold season,

assailed by night noises, sounds in a correspondence based more on bravura than the contents of this failing world.

Start with A as in ANT, and give to every terror a soothing name.

Death is a white boy backing out a lawnmower from the garage,

staring down the black girl's hello,

silently reentering the cool shell of his house.

Is it an accident?

She is working without quotes, never looking down.

The sunlight thickens at the end of the day bringing the edges off

things nearer,

sharp laughs that break the honeyed silences.

In night country all routes are approximately marked.

There the exact temperature of the prison can be felt,

the degrees distancing "home" from its public relations and denial,

at night the shortest moments rustle in their chains;

the invisible blends in.

Ecstasy

What have we to look forward to but old age an unfolding of the flesh into some foreign package

whose stamps we barely recognize whose worries are like lint we pick up from nowhere

the scar of it from no accident we can recall

but obtained in the dark, in the dark

theater we embrace a faded script.

105



I can't explain it. I looked up from the page and found myself fully

grown. It lasted for about an hour.

Here's my strength?to follow the meaning even as it stands zig zag along the sheer edges of sight; the brittle garlands of thought

jagged tooth scaling the horizon.

Noted for my level head

even among these unfinished songs.

Instead of planning beauty, I, as they say,

"let it happen." Let eyes connect the dots.

Air connive with the invisible.

Ecstasy is blind and moves on wings, torn feathers.

City of Heaven

I take pains to letter the streets. Grid made rigorous in all directions.

Sky locked. Exits clearly marked. Lines ruled. Feet pointing right way, never up. Streets crossed. Traffic light. Statues armed or at least la

belled. Populace populous. Decorous youth prowling in grief stricken

black. Middle aged adults utterly filled to the brim and thus of no use

to anyone. Floorwalkers guarded. Streetwalkers spectacular. Police men

acing or impossible to find. Parks geometric and park walkers expo

nential rise as the day's heat peaks at full noon. Radios rocket. Manag ers on ladders fight their descent on the food chain. Everyone else cut

off, cut out to fit or lose.

In the long run, there is no such thing as balance. You are all the way

in or you are out of bounds. There is no way to extinguish this dialec

tic except through draft after draft of textual ethics, the mechanics and

clanking machinery of reader focussed phonetics. I feel transparent. As

fast as light. Paradise, where there are innumerable backdoors, and

nothing to be afraid of. Nothing broken. Nothing fixed about it. Clar

ity in a blink of an eye.

106



ecstasy

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