Читать книгу Time Will Clean the Carcass Bones - Lucia Perillo - Страница 19

Kilned

I was trying to somehow keep [my early pieces] true to their nature,

to allow the crudeness to be their beauty. Now I want the lava to

teach me what it does best.

STEPHEN LANG

These days when my legs twitch like hounds under the sheets

and the eyes are troubled by a drifting fleck —

I think of him: the artist

who climbs into the lava runs at Kalapana,

the only person who has not fled from town

fearing the advance of basalt tongues.

He wears no special boots, no special clothes,

no special breather mask to save him

from poison fumes. And it is hot, so hot

the sweat drenches him and shreds his clothes

as he bends to plunge his shovel

where the earth’s bile has found its way to surface.

When he catches fire, he’ll roll in a patch of moss

then simply rise and carry on. He will scoop

this pahoehoe, he will think of Pompeii

and the bodies torqued in final grotesque poses.

Locals cannot haul away their wooden churches fast enough,

they call this the wrath of Madame Pele,

the curse of a life that was so good

they should have known to meet it with suspicion.

But this man steps into the dawn and its yellow flames,

spins each iridescent blue clod in the air

before spreading it on a smooth rock ledge to study.

First he tries to see what this catastrophe is saying.

Then, with a trowel in his broiling hand,

he works to sculpt it into something human.