Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Hot and Hot

In a book I read recently, the author talks about taking iboga and visiting the sun to find angelic beings moving at incredibly high speeds, a picture that's lodged firmly in my imagination these days, taking a Blakian form.

Does heat cure hot? In my delirium, it seems that I need to cover up in black linen and wool to hide from heat, to drink hot water infused with cloves, to surround myself with creosote tarred logs, coal and things as dark and rich as mussel shells, asphalt, half burned rags. For color, some roses. Not the embalmer's roses that smell like death and hopelessness, but the ones that make a pyramid of citrus, spice and attar, those that hold you by the nose and dare you to walk away, the ones that make you cry because you have to go.

At Coney Island, clean, clear, calm, cold Atlantic water swimming with small sand-colored minnows you can only see because of their shadows, broken razor clams and purple black mussel shells rolling in the mica-flecked surf, some unopened. Everything edged with light. On the heads of the jetties, cormorants, birds that both fly and swim, swaggering between worlds, but while resting on the jagged rocks with their beaks angling towards the clouds, the slim black figures were the brush strokes of a long dead painter whose hand became a bird.

I don't think I'll stop thinking about hot things for a while, industrial grade pizza ovens, engines, asphalt, magma, Hasidim in full black coats and fur hats, chestnuts, cinnamon, the interiors of warehouses and of barns where the perfume of hay rides high in the heat, the aroma of tea, pepper, scorching silica, the crabs someone left to die in a hole, who can say why. Burning, expediting, purifying heat.

3 comments:

Nicola Masciandaro said...

How can the moth *not* burn?

amarilla said...

The moth was always burning, but you'd never know it.

Robin Morrison said...

Jeez, heat makes your writing hot.

oringy

I let it speak for itself.