of the skinny ten-year-old playing in the woods

near grandfather's farm in Burkeville, of all the moons

I watched tremble in the evening skies and the rope 

swing with a tractor tire on the end of it,

the wonder of centrifugal force, the spinning 

majesty of the dervish, and even though I did not know yet about Rumi,

I knew that god lived at the edge of the gaining

spiral, that the whirl of blood in my brain

matched the spin of the cosmic wheel, the one 

god that rules over all of us, and infinitely so.



Even without the big tire, I'd spin

amid the lightning bugs in a Virginia dusk

when the dark fell and the stars came out,

those regions of big dippers and bears,

and with each breathless circling

I'd feel the pull of something greater

than myself—scrambled neurons, 

gaping ganglia and pulsating

arteries, my body itself the scattered verse

of eons, my body electric and pierced


by bug light and cosmic night. Oh, great

god almighty, why did I capture those

little angels and trap them in a jar?

Where soon their tiny lights would fade

and only an insect would remain, where

once there had been that sweet

yellow dancing on the margins

of tobacco fields and woods that rose

and fell in the swelter, the sea of dusk.

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