The Living Earth

The living Earth, tugged by the sun, rolls around in space with the moon on its back. We say, “The sun rises in the East and sets in the west,” but really, the horizon just drops off. I’ve read things like, “If the Earth were flat, we’d be able to dig to China,” and it was a serious debate. The round Earth rolls over space and the sun proves it. The eclipse of the moon...it slivers and shines and climbs over the Earth like a child. It pulls the tide...it proves the Earth is round, too, but the conversation ended harshly with the inability to dig to China. The Earth is beautiful and strange. It matches color; there’s order. It’s green and red and blue. The rusty, ever betraying species has inhabited it. The ones with the elongated foreheads, the high noses and, in their stages, the ones with their swagger. The egg: Earth spins around in the cold, dead fridge: space and its yolk: the human, half-man half-monkey race orbits and burns and melts, smoking stone and breathing water. It’s a beast. I’ve seen it move (it attacked me) but I could have just been high on magic mushrooms—a delicacy you can find plenty of places. I escaped the Earth in a cave somewhere underwater—south of the cities where in each there was *godlessness* and magic under the carpets in every house. Their homes were all spell-bound. There were trees that gripped the air and the Earth, passing oxygen into the atmosphere in exchange for poison. I think they see the future and talk secretly in the wind. I watched angels dwell in them but they were all spoiled and violent. Elephants remember everything and they’re huge. Snakes are blind. The moon keeps the night and keeps a part of the day, often hiding. Stars sugar the night. The humans practice torture before God and end prayers with clasped hands. I’m going out to scar my body with ink now that the grip of the planet has missed. It’s going to be an image of the Earth’s right hand. I’ll print it on my hip.