and Ezekiel….
…kept sensing the fire. God would not
stop talking to him. The voice of God becomes
the body of his book, becomes the plot

and the setting, the mood and the moment. The mystery
of prophecy brought down to the daily slog
of warnings against harlotry and bad
allegiances, and just how smoke-spitting mad

that driver of the wheels in wheels could be.
The receiver of a gift is never free.
We can’t predict exactly what we’ll be given,
but we know the sweetest chains hang down from heaven

or lie along the ground in lengths that seem
like something we could bear. When you see the smoke
that rises from the flint-strikes of your children’s
hearts drift up into the air, like a dream

almost of smoke, and make a wheel in the air
and then another wheel inside, and then ovals,
then chain links to wear, you’ll slip them on like a crown
or a robe, and they will hold you up, then down,

and then somewhere suspended in the air.
But you won’t care, you’ll hang there and pump your legs
like running and claw your hands to climb; you’ll shout
for the ground to rise and meet you there, you’ll beg

the sky to fall, you’ll try to turn around,
but nothing will happen, save for the swinging you’ve set
now in motion, and your body will become
a pendulum for a clock inside the sun,

or somewhere above the sun. You can’t really see
how far the chain rises above your hands,
which are gripping it now as tightly as a bird
grips the bars of its cage, or delicately,

like a left hand curled around a banjo’s neck,
and you’re swinging with considerable force from the chain
your children wove for you, and you can hear the clock
pounding out its heartbeats, and there’s a pain

in your forearms from the holding on, but you’re gladdened
by your weight, that the simple fact of you is working
in a way you couldn’t predict, that something’s turning
and set to life. Now the swinging becomes diurnal.

Each push and pull of the pendulum you’ve become
becomes a day and night, so you get to where
you know if you can just make it again to light
you’ll keep the workings somehow working right,

and though you’ll never know the time, you might hear
your children playing in the hours you’ve made,
or the wind rummaging through the trees outside,
allowing us our sunlight, then our shade,

which reminds you that you might be dreaming here,
or receiving a vision, foreknowledge of the plot
we’re spinning through, and there’s as good a chance
of waking from this dream as there is not.