Holding my gut I go down again, weighted to fall and enlarging with every knocked tumble, rotationally increased in this revolting around…until I smack, at the wall of the Town Hall of this nowhere that once birthed my Aba, or would have — brought to a stop, then further dispersion, as I gather myself out from a puff of lacteal snow. Each flake is a number, a tock’s mark, a dendrite’s tooth, the fang of a frozen petal. A weather of myself, of my own making, a sprinkling of cloud rounded above into the clock of the Hall, which holds as if prismimprisoned the face of a different sister of mine every hour — not on the hour but slipping, this slide sororal, a slow tinting change of their lights, of their darks, the bows of their eyes at the zeroes…and it’s then that I realize I’m lulled overheated, feverishly stuffed, not just that but perhaps even poisoned, shvitzing with a pain in the belly and I’m breathing too heavy like I’m snoring awake. Lightheaded, airy. With each flappy uvular heave, as if the attempted swallow of a little white grape refusing to make its way down…I’m growing, it feels, as if in the lunarly regulated shed and regrowth of the dial’s hand I’d kept swept and zipped tight within the skirts of my mother, but more so, all over. My stomach, my poor poor stomach as Ima would’ve said, heaves up a groan, as my breasts like hers, too, they’re stretching, like the striated hairs she might bleach as they stray toward a splotch, the purple and black how we’d match…I’m inflationary, pumping to pop, the ribroped, hipcinched robe of my body now rising, now risen, expanding, while encompassing air — O sweet vinestirred milk, seething to mother my blood…render me unto the care that was hers!
In the beginning I’m filling the Square, the dusky paths in, the pass out…the parts nighted unknown to the high other senses lost in my purge, in my paunching, me smeared wetgreased into doorways to mark them with my greed: fillingout this village’s loose waist of houses and pens, of barns and threshedover clearings, to fill the circling town then the valley it’s breasted within, and the next, down into the valley before that, a womb bearing beyond. Then atop this enormity, too, outerlimits it’s feeling like now, my head floating upward into the void stratospheric, the darkness invisible and so, indivisible there, with all the other nightly ordinance that might float obscured in the light of the moon, and then even the moon itself with all of its seasons and cycles to clock, to gather into orbit — around me; pushed, pulled, and then held, steadied, then moved around and around, spun by my force, the tidal grip and grope of my flesh. Attraction’s what I’m talking, a refusal to give up, let go. No, not a satellite or planetary, I’m bigger than that, I’m a star, for real this time as my sisters would’ve said and been jealously awed — finally, the firmament taking a shine; me holding worlds together, aloft, setting them to motion about the poles of my horns. A body, and what a body! celestial; its catasterism total, destructive — the Milky Way purged from my gut with the flick of a cometlike tail, the boilingpoint of my burning intestine…a Meaty Way horizoning at the other extremity, toward my tush a blackhole into which all time must fall, a God’s malpracticed, mistaken navel. Around my scars and around my marks and my wens, my sores and my pimples: this gathering of constellations, of galaxy, universe; it feels as if the whole cosmos, which is perfect in idea only, if only within me: wholeheaded, requiring no twohanded repair — as if it’s about to burst forth and bang, to explode in dim peals flaking my meat to the milkslippery, milkwhite stones both hewn and geologies found, formed below the steeples of the Church, beneath the spire of the Town Hall’s meridian, amid this Square’s void cleaving a valley past the womb and breast of my mother whose husband converted and so, my father was damned. And, as if in belated revenge or his belfry redemption, I’m borne above the throng of those he’d forsaken, these statues blinded, the deaf and mute rock, the crushed gut of this bridge, that vomitus river, itself a flow stormily swollen…God no better than them, still I’m bursting with greatness, milked as His highness so huge above all, so taken with myself — how I’m ascending unto the Uppermost, if you know it, you should…
