The mystery of the living room window, the membrane.

The clouds right now are the Pillars of Creation.

Above a shaggy horizon of tropical trees–shapes of hydrogen from deep space!

Heat beyond our conception, surrounded by absolute zero…

*

Miami, in a heat wave.  There’s no going out in the day.  Sun-blasted streets.  Ocean hotter than blood.  Fish dying.

We’re lucky to live in a bubble–with AC, supplies, work.

A biosphere.  In the big window, masses of trees.  Continued in here by plants.  By you, moving from room to room.

The sun and trees, with their roots in still-wet earth, interact.  You breathe, speak, laugh…

The window somehow keeps out the heat, lets in the light.  Keeps out, I think, the silence of the melting tar.

We’ve evolved to handle the chilled air on our bare skin. 

Delicate creatures, comfortable only at 76 *F.  Moaning otherwise.  Feeling infinite gradations within that one degree.

Music plays in the dome.

News of the world.  War, hate.  Families grieving.  I have a membrane to let in a taste of this, screen out the rest.  You, less so, are crying.

The rooms are harmonious.  But the candles scare me, the naked flames.  The knives scare me, the naked blades.

In room 3, you’re working.

Looking up from my work, I’ve been tracking the sun’s progress.  It’s now quite low.

A green parrot lands on the palm in the window.  Flies off into heat waves, like Noah’s dove; does not return…

The sun is now pink!  A perfect disc, etched, with no glare. 

You come with me to the window; holding hands we watch it touch the trees, sink into their green jelly.

It’s time to go out, in the so-called cool of the evening.  Into air like oozing fur.  The beast has found water, and shade. Shivers with pleasure, which we feel as breeze.

Other domers, in doorways, test the air.  Creep outside.  Across the street, surrounded by industrial fans, people are gathering for a drink.  Chilled wine, frosted beer mugs.  We join them.

Salem Village–outpost of godliness.  Surrounded by forest where the Wabanaki are massing.

Penetrated by the Devil.  The invisible world is everywhere.  Witches meet in the home of a pious family, right in front of them!

A strange creature beside the path at twilight. Turns into 3 women who fly off.

The specter of the old widow, suddenly in the room, tortures the sick girl with inhuman seizures.

The leading citizens knock on the widow’s door, examine her body. Find a teat, between her fingers, where a dog or a hog must suckle.

Even Salem has fallen away.  Fewer attend church.  Fewer are baptized.  Tempted by the Quakers, or by slight innovations in doctrine.  There have been thefts. 

The family returns from the long sermon, to study further in the cold parlor.  In a hothouse of gossip, feuds.  Sunk in the invisible world.  With the Wabanaki at the first trees…

Next door, the sick girl still sees them butcher her parents.

In the meeting house, she faces her tormentor.  “Your movements, right now, are controlling my movements.”

The witches are hanged in small groups.  The churchgoer.  The one whose decades of loneliness broke her.  Buried outside the village.

But more and more are afflicted.  And more and more are signing the Devil’s book.

Their specters eat red bread and go forth in an assault.

God could make it stop.  The Devil is not free here, only on a long leash.  To do God’s bidding.  To chastise.

Finally, he can go to town.  Create demons of a whole new order. 

Play with the already-traumatized.  Throw the 80 year-old in jail, in winter.

The village is immersed in the Devil’s nature.  In the forest, the shamans of the Wabanaki sacrifice their firstborn.  Are becoming impervious to musket-fire.

A Black servant accuses the Governor’s wife.  A reverend is hanged.

The villagers are cleaving harder to God.  Crowding the church.  Getting baptized as adults.  They agree with the finest points of doctrine.  When will it be enough?

Standing still for a minute in the park, it’s like a Disney movie—the birds and squirrels gather round. 

What’s the difference between this bird, with his mohawk and orange beak, turning sideways to look at me with one bright eye, and the new leaves swaying behind him?

Plants and animals split off from an earlier life-form.  And on the sea floor there are vegetables with mouths.

The tulips, so upright and alive, like a teenage choir.  And this squirrel rising up on two legs to stare at me.

Look at those shoulders, arms and forearms, chest.  Even a navel!

No doubt we communicate creature to creature.  I try to beam him good will.  Can’t eat good will.  He scampers off, with a single curse, then leaps onto the trunk of a tree, powers up the spiral stair.  Our one encounter in this life…

And the tulip.  Little ice cliff of flower flesh. 

The birches are radiant in themselves.   Then amplified by sun from a clear sky, bouncing off them, off other trees, off people carrying their coats–all these waves colliding in a brilliant haze.

Bird with the orange beak, perched on a low wire fence.  I know this will be brief.  But it’s actually lasting a while, through many jerky frame by frame movements of your head… 

Branch of new leaves, you work your magic on me.  You’re not going anywhere.  I sink into you, smiling.  Pure life shining.  Something in me lets your swaying slow my heartbeat.