"Heat Lightning near Louisville, Kentucky," B. Badgett, 2010
It’s five in the morning, and I’m moving through the
shadows in shadow by touch, unsteadily scuffling with
small ravines. A ghost – its spin axis a pale torso – drifts
past, trailing a sound like brushes on sand, gleaming for
a fraction of a second in the glint and shudder of heat
lightning. Storm’s so far off I can’t hear it, but it’s close
enough to press its gold coin into my eyes as it passes.
Sweat like nettles where I’ve chafed, the pointed burn
of a fire ant unhappy with my position in life, a rebuke
after dinner: I’m so thin-skinned, tears abrade as they
well up, sting as they dampen my cheeks. It’s the heat
of the day, of some moment clinging to itself, you say;
but I know it’s the broken shards cutting underfoot after
we brought the hammer down on this shell of a world.
The damp air becomes a spicebox as I walk between
floods. The smell of rotting Johnson grass, retted blades
waving from beneath piles of brush like some drowned
Ophelia; the last star jasmine, sweet overlaying petrichor;
the ammoniac smell of bats under a bridge. In this way
I navigate between the sacred and the mundane, nose
twitching, moth to the flame shining on my fingernails.
There’s a mirage along the far edge of the playa, and I’m slowly walking
towards it. I measure distance in time here: the weeks since I started,
how many more weeks to travel, as the skin of the alkali basin crackles
under my feet. The moon sets, and the air drops its furious heat into a
thermal sinkhole. Now I can see it, the tilted uplift lined dark on dark
by the absence of stars; the mountain still weeks away, still months tall.
