Chapter 88

for Bill W.

The sun was roaring through the trees, blinding and hurtling me back through time, towards Attila, and Genghis Khan: such a sun once signaled surge of harness, the huge hot rise of charging horses, with flashing eyes of men and metal.

Meadows, especially, were good grounds for killing.
I took a sword in the mouth.
How the horses suffered.

Keep swinging back: pre-born Africa,
where mud-baked pygmies birth the sun
anew each year, so you and I
their children have the light.

Today the sun is never quite as bright as that,
and there are very few pygmies left who remember.

Reaching even further back
we cruise the plain of flame,
burning world of rude red rock
and incandescent sky which
only dinosaurs remember.

In such a time was fire in the sky,
and gods in the dancing blackness.

Now towards the end of time
the sun is thin.

Little we see in Nature that is ours.