Miller Oberman

The process of through is ongoing. The earth doesn’t seem to move, but sometimes we fall down against it and seem to briefly alight on its turning. We were just going. I was just leaving, which is to say, coming elsewhere. Transient. I was going as I came, the words move through my limbs, lungs,                mouth, as I appear to sit peacefully at your hearth           transubstantiating some wine. It was a rough red,              it was one of those nights we were not forced by circumstances                       to drink wine out of mugs. Circumstances being,      in those cases, no one had been transfixed at the kitchen sink long enough       to wash dishes. I brought armfuls of wood           from the splitting stump. Many of them, because it was cold,      went right on top of their recent ancestors.              It was an ice night. They transpired visibly,            resin to spark, bark to smoke, wood to ash.        I was transgendering and drinking     the rough red at roughly the same rate           and everyone who looked, saw. The translucence of flames       beat against the air against our skins.                          This can be done with or without clothes on.               This can be done with or without wine or whiskey        but never without water: evaporation is also ongoing.       Most visibly in this case in the form of wisps of steam     rising from the just washed hair of a form at the fire whose beauty was                  in the earth’s turning, that night and many nights,      transcendent. I felt heat changing me.                    The word for this is transdesire, but in extreme cases                 we call it transdire