This is the beginning.
Almost anything can happen.
This is where you find
the creation of light, a fish
wriggling onto land,
the first word of Paradise
Lost on an empty page.
Think of an egg, the letter
A,
a woman ironing on a bare
stage
as the heavy curtain rises.
This is the very beginning.
The first-person narrator
introduces himself,
tells us about his lineage.
The mezzo-soprano stands in
the wings.
Here the climbers are studying
a map
or pulling on their long
woolen socks.
This is early on, years before
the Ark, dawn.
The profile of an animal is
being smeared
on the wall of a cave,
and you have not yet learned
to crawl.
This is the opening, the
gambit,
a pawn moving forward an inch.
This is your first night with
her,
your first night without her.
This is the first part
where the wheels begin to
turn,
where the elevator begins its
ascent,
before the doors lurch apart.
This is the middle.
Things have had time to get
complicated,
messy, really. Nothing is
simple anymore.
Cities have sprouted up along
the rivers
teeming with people at
cross-purposes—
a million schemes, a million
wild looks.
Disappointment unshoulders his
knapsack
here and pitches his ragged
tent.
This is the sticky part where
the plot congeals,
where the action suddenly
reverses
or swerves off in an
outrageous direction.
Here the narrator devotes a
long paragraph
to why Miriam does not want
Edward's child.
Someone hides a letter under a
pillow.
Here the aria rises to a
pitch,
a song of betrayal, salted
with revenge.
And the climbing party is
stuck on a ledge
halfway up the mountain.
This is the bridge, the
painful modulation.
This is the thick of things.
So much is crowded into the
middle—
the guitars of Spain, piles of
ripe avocados,
Russian uniforms, noisy
parties,
lakeside kisses, arguments
heard through a wall—
too much to name, too much to
think about.
And this is the end,
the car running out of road,
the river losing its name in
an ocean,
the long nose of the
photographed horse
touching the white electronic
line.
This is the colophon, the last
elephant in the parade,
the empty wheelchair,
and pigeons floating down in
the evening.
Here the stage is littered
with bodies,
the narrator leads the
characters to their cells,
and the climbers are in their
graves.
It is me hitting the period
and you closing the book.
It is Sylvia Plath in the
kitchen
and St. Clement with an anchor
around his neck.
This is the final bit
thinning away to nothing.
This is the end, according to
Aristotle,
what we have all been waiting
for,
what everything comes down to,
the destination we cannot help
imagining,
a streak of light in the sky,
a hat on a peg, and outside
the cabin, falling leaves.
Picnic Lightning (1998)
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