Heat/Stroke
Crawled. I
crawled. Knees and palms.
Concrete scratching
my fingertips.
My heart’s heat a rotten star
in my chest, ratcheting
with each breath,
blood-flush
through my right temple
so loud
I was sure the deer off the trail
could hear it.
June day as still
as my cotton tongue.
A running man burns
five hundred calories
an hour,
and I wanted that hour.
Wasn’t there. I
wasn’t there.
I was in my head, my room,
the framed picture
of my body five years before,
thin and slender,
knee-deep in the lake’s
burnished silver surface.
Trees surrendered their needles
and pitch onto my shoulders,
a sharp perfume
like loss, both sweet
and sting.
And, face warm against concrete,
I wanted to lose.
Lose those years
and be buried in that glass frame,
in that photo’s thin body.
I was there,
inside that perfect,
that everything I wanted.
Revival, Epworth Bible Camp, Summer 2007
I’m the strut of starlight
in the open tabernacle—
I’m the songs of leopard frogs
in the dew-spackled grass.
all backbone and fire-wrack.
I’m the warp and the wrest.
I’m the rasped ash
of a wasp rising, rising,
I’m ridden. I’ve rode.
I’ve rid. I’ve lost
my tongue, my tonsils.
My throat’s an owl falling,
thorn-nicked.
I’m burr-licked.
Gnat–kicked,
I’m clown and cloud
I’m the end.
And the end.
Photo by Tom Hilton 
