Let’s say he worships at the alabaster temple. Let’s say he prays at the altar in light of the cathode ray. Let’s say he bows to a pale-lit late-night glance, and let’s say he kneels before the silken want.

Let’s say she blinks his way, then slowly suggests a walk toward motel rooms that she wants filled with red cut flowers. Let’s say she functions on some need to be the queen of no one boy.

Then let’s say he curses time like it’s a turned shoulder. Then let’s say he takes his music raw like whiskey. Let’s say he punches a door and twists in twitching sleep, when summer rusts under an acid rain and jams the apparatus of love with a shudder.

Let’s say she soars on laundered dollars. Let’s say she dresses in vintage denim, and let’s say she wears a green wool coat and summer’s not her chosen season.

Now, let’s say he’s in a forest and the forest’s burning gold. Let’s say he stares at a river twenty-nine miles long. Let’s say now he wears denim and takes off the green coat that smells like musty wool and dunks it in the river. Let’s say he holds it down a long time, till his hands turn blue, till the final trembling bubble rises.

XXVII

We are not silent. We play the cast iron flutes of the mythic. We are the sound, the source of everything good, says the diesel generator, and the source of everything bad. We leave the conversation there. An agreement has been reached. It is then the diesel generator remembers the fine carpet, the way it soaked up the sounds of water dripping. All water is not tears falling from the eyes of a woman in a basement room, the diesel generator reminds himself. All flutes are not the instruments of nostalgia. All things mythical are not mythical. But by then, the silence, slowly, has been soaked up by the silence.

XXVIII

The diesel generator can read no further. There on a rainy fall day an epiphany is received like a phone call to say that the items left in the attic have been sold at auction. Sold: a method for penetrating the frozen lake. Sold: the old red couch. Sold: a method for suspension of disbelief at the nature of weather vs. the heat in a room filled with the laughter and the soft touches shaped by the great want. Two people ignite and their flames linger when the diesel generator’s remorse is rendered obsolete by the wood stove. The diesel generator carefully folds some feelings and tosses them into the stove, where they catch fire instantly. And so the rhyme is closed, and so the heart is magically removed.