Spinning Wheel

                                    for Becca Keaton

She calls this threading
the needle, mixing the gases
until they catch
fire—
        or inflame,
releasing what is already
within (whatever fire is).
The world seems solid in
its artifacts—though
she knows only the surface
is frozen—
                and underneath,
it flows through rusted cans,
corrugation
from some failed shelter,
parts of an old sewing machine—
the wheel going nowhere.

When the small star could pass
through almost anything,

the sculptor takes up her torch.

                               *

She has no memory of this,
but she’s told that it happened.

Once—and possibly more than once—
habit turned against itself.

It bloomed like an opal and
unraveled.

                The nebula expanded,
cracking like a penitent’s whip.

The elements would be recast
in the acetylene of a beginning

or an end.  The poles kept reversing—
until the day the welder stood

in the schoolyard and let the sun go dark
and watched the playground glow at the seams.

                               *

At Bethlehem Steel,
it was the start of an epiphanic century.

At the company school,
boys were learning the Bessemer process

and the workers’ daughters were learning
to sew.

Everything but marriage
was arranged in advance.

From the coast to the interior
the steel rails rang,
slick with whale oil from the machinery—

and the stars seemed inexhaustible.

                               *

The metal yields to a new oblivion
of heat.

With every stitch, what is could be
undone, wavering

like some dip-in-the-road mirage.
But she knows there is no other earth,

even if the fire can trace
the wormlike calligraphy of missing threads.

Along the wheel’s rim she attaches
an armor of tines she knows
will ring—

                like something aeolian
waiting to be touched.

Originally published in The Cincinnati Review