Tree trunks seem to keep shrinking all winter,
and by mid-March the Elk River’s visible in blips
from horizon to horizon, when the sun’s going
down. Some things I want, I only get a glimpse
of. Coltrane at his gentlest—you can still hear
what’s harnessed, though. He might be playing “Soul Eyes,”
but it’s not just eyes. His sax is opening its
mouth like a hole in space. I have the theory of a
net laid across as a kind of protection. It is like
latitude and longitude, or more abstractly, the warp
and woof of belief, the kind of thinking that
separates day from night, heaven from earth, and so on.
Suppose the universe began as a tear in the fabric
of another universe. On a two-dimensional plane,
the tear would look like a pushed-out curve
the shape of Coltrane’s saxophone. What if there are
ten dimensions, and Coltrane is in the three
of space and the one of time, and the rest are hidden?
They might be quivering out there like branches
of invisible trees, or wormholes in the branches. This
is a very religious feeling, beyond belief. Not
everything is vertical or horizontal. I keep thinking
I should do something instead of just stand
here, it is all so beautiful for the few minutes
I can see the flat plane of blazing water
through the trees, and the terrific sun on the brink.