I want again to believe that when we love we remain passing always from this light into the next. To remember those x-rays of my lungs I was shown as a child whose gauzy shadows I thought were hidden wings. You could feel the hot fist of the heart but where was the soul? And that his shoulder blades when Billy stripped by the river were more than bones and that we would someday lift our arms. We had seen the gleaned skeletons of birds drying on the salt flats. On each wing, a thumb and four bird fingers. How we lost faith and knew that the minister's collar was a halo that had slipped, a noose that reddened his face and made it difficult for him to look down. Billy believed that the 13 loops of the hangman's noose made a hoop into the next life. Me, I practiced that knot over and over. But now there's no way back and at night I ingest the room and into the room, the building and into that, the city and the lake, until I am pulling in all those edgeless places where this galaxy becomes another.
©Bruce Hunter, 2000 -- unauthorized duplication prohibited