Honoring the Lizard of Oz

This is from the first time I met the beardies. They belonged to the super sweet family I was working for at the time, but they are ours now. Their names are Crikers and Beaut, in honor of the late Steve Erwin, I believe. They look fearsome for the first thirty seconds or so, and then they just look sort of earnestly vacant. What surprised me most was their fragility, and warmth. Normally when I think of a lizard, say, an iguana, I think of something cold and slimy-hard like a crab, or leathery like that little rubbery plastic alligator we had for years until its bottom jaw eventually got ripped off by a couple of vigorously well-meaning tykes. But these little guys, just beneath their fearsomely spiky skins (which looked almost like exoskeletons, but were thinner than mine), were as soft and delicate-boned as rabbits. One hung down the front of my shirt like a huge brooch, curling his sharp little claws into my mercifully thick sweater. The other draped himself across my shoulder. Mom, who was with me, held one in the crook of her arm like a baby and rocked it for awhile. She discovered that when she turned, the lizard would keep his head in the same place and let his little body pivot around it like a door-hinge. The one I was holding did that too. One of the Thomson boys said his grandmother’s chickens do the same thing. He said he could lift any of them up, down, side to side, and it would stretch its little neck as far as it could to keep its head at the same point on the x, y, and z planes as it had started. With that kind of 3D precision, I think we should start hiring lizards and chickens to be fighter pilots. Who knows? World peace could be just around the corner.

Supermassive Black Hole

Last night dreamed big again. I don't remember what I started out doing, something social but boring I figure. It must have been boring, because somehow I got detached from the globe and started drifting out into space. I picked up speed the farther I went, and wrapped my arms around my head to ward off all the planets and stars I was bumping into along the way. There were lots of glimmering clouds and arms of galaxies with stars and all sorts of stuff in them, and as I flew by I got to thinking I must be on some sort of "Powers of Ten" journey and would soon be able to see the whole universe before I drifted off into infinite space. I didn't get that far, but far enough out to see a whole bunch of individual galaxies. Many of the spiral ones had rays and curtains of light refracting out in all colors from supermassive black holes at their cores. As I passed through one of these curtains/columns of iridescent light I felt a tug from the immense gravitational hurricane at the center and started to worry. The pull of the black hole was such that it sent ripples and distortions through all of the surrounding light, and felt like a current pulling towards a maelstom in the middle of the sea. So I started to swim, and barely reached the other side of the light/rainbow/gravity column before I would've hit the event horizon. I kept drifting on, a little shook up, knowing that with all these supermassive black holes floating around and me with neither rudder nor engine, there was only so long I could last. I hit the next gravity column (which was really quite beautiful, like rainbows and the aurora borealis - they all were that way), felt that massive tug and thought that was it. But when I got to the event horizon, the great heavy darkness in front of me dissolved and changed, and I stood up on the floor of a room covered and lined with old brown paper sacks. There was some kind of square black processing machine (like the x-ray machines you put your stuff through in an airport) on a long fold-up table that was slowly sucking in and digesting one long sheet of this rainbow material, construction paper or something, although nothing was coming out on the other side. There were two or three people in the room: Krystin and Allison were there, and maybe one or two others. I think I was slightly annoyed, or just puzzled - I don't remember, because then I woke up.

Black and White and Red all over...

Cover them in black and white stripes. Dust and picks drum the red clay road, kicking up rusty clouds the size of carpetbaggers' pockets.

Humdrum rumbles the hole in the window – sucks downwind and I hear the rhythm of the men on the road. Their faces are rosy as the pale sky cools. A magpie lands on an old barn. Coal piles shift and crackle under sifted snow next to an iron-red stove.

The children cry as their mothers knead. Flour sifts through the air around them, cottony clouds, sticky on the tongue. The black bowls fill with sugar and cherries. The ovens gape their wide red mouths. They are first fed, then feed.

Black skirts swim around my ankles, the rim of white hugs my cheekbones as I smile. I hold a thick red book above my head, its pages flap open at the vaulted rafters. Quiet now. The children are fed, their books are open, the room is cold, their noses are red. Clouds roll blankly against the iron windows.

Appleskin breaks at the blade of a knife. The flesh under the blood red is snowy, and the seeds nestle like negative diamonds deep at the heart, dark and smooth as the pupils of eyes.

Listen to a black violin. The man under his snowy hair strokes the strings, sounds like the color of your heart.

The man's hands raise against the air. His shirt is white. The gun is black, and quick, and dark. Death follows in flowing scarves of red.

Newborn cries, the whites of its eyes and the red little mouth are round. Black is the tiny fuzz of hair. You are newer than copper pennies that glint like fire on the asphalt.

A beat of drums pounds red in your bones as you run from the moon, bathing you in white, in silver, in the colors of the old. You breathe hard with your red mouth and run and run and run. You run from the shadows, and you run from the light. You run from the only thing you cannot leave behind. You run, maybe forever, into the blackest night you ever saw.

One day the road will end, and the sun will set and flush against sharp black mountains. You will pause for breath then, and you will see, in the distance, a humble white light. You will watch the sun and say a prayer, and then you will run home.