. . .To choose between knowing the truth
or, on the other hand, orgasm and repose,
always with the patience of a cricket on guard
in case Spring should arrive in disguise,
hiding its muscular body under rags,
its footsteps muffled by the mating of vines--
to choose at all, we have to crawl
and plead among the red columns of silos,
in the dust of exploding grains,
with shaking hands and trembling lips
plead for a severing of knives.
If now in the blackest hole we sometimes dance
and lift plain water to our lips to toast
our good luck, and if in a thicket of almonds
with a smell of oil before it turns
to bitter wine,
we laugh so hard we lose our bodies momentarily,
we are also, at the same time, absorbing
the shivering of all cities,
born of this baked earth, this chaste diamond
that flowered, reluctantly, absurdly,
into an eternity of ice
and descended through the decorations of the frost
to be shipwrecked in space.
And so each morning I throw a little chalk into my coffee
in memory of the blood and bones of the universe,
and each morning I eat some sacramental bread
as a prayer
not to become one of the thieves
but to save and keep my life for whenever I may need it,
perhaps when things are going better,
when everything is or isn't sevens,
and the planet is in perpetual motion
giving regular birth to the spaces behind her.
I myself swear never to be surprised
when someone elects to stay in the womb.
True silence existed only before there was life
and was eaten in the first rain of the universe,
beaten into piles of grain and no grain
in the first silo, in the first air,
without a place to put a foot down, without an us,
all in a hole
that held (aloft? upside down?) as if in an iris
the thin tracings of the first wax,
and of the first delicate amoebic embracings,
and of the shapes to come when love
began to sever us.

-Marvin bell,
The Closed Iris of Creation