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This was a fun one to read out loud.

Said the Sun to the Earth

 

    Said the sun to the earth, you seem very beautiful to me. Said the earth to the sun, but my Sun, have you seen my dirt? The sun kissed the earth with waves of photons that undulate through space like seaweed and murmured, I don't know what dirt is. I know what light is, and I understand darkness, but I don't know what dirt is. To me, you are the solution to the darkness that surrounds me, and also the antithesis to the fire that burns me. Basking, the earth said, but you don't understand. The way your hydrogen burns is so pure, so self convicted and determined to devour itself. I am afraid, he sighed, you would not understand things like dirt. The sun, she bathed him in her heat (and all of us who are alive understand that heat. it is also called desire, also, truth and hope) and asked, try.

 

    -Alright. What you need to understand is that even the dirt loves the foot that stamps on it, just as the antelope loves the lion as it tears out it's throat. Life loves life. I feel across my body the hope within decaying logs. They will feed those who are yet to come with their own bodies, like cannibalism, like true love.

    What I think you understand, my sun, is that decay is a form of love. The Brazilian family, with their bellies full of hookworms and their women pregnant and silent, that is a form of decay and I love them for it. Their struggle still feels wonderful. I feel them writing about themselves (and when they write, they never write we are writing we are writing, but, the virgin mary has come to me and she has asked of me to marry soccorro, despite her bastard child) and about cities that never existed except for one tubercular man in a garret in London during the Blitz and about passions that never transpired except for a moment's glance between a man and a woman who never met again. And I am bewildered that they don't spend sunrise to sunset sitting on the dirt watching the million different chemical reactions called life. I love life for it's inability to reach equilibrium. I love all of them for their restlessness to be more than cells, learn how to grow horns, hair, fins, fingers, learn how to fuck and fight, leave gifts for no reason at one anothers dwellings.

    I love the child with smallpox. I love smallpox. I love the forest fire and the genocide and I love them all for being alive and unwilling to settle. I dread stillness. Dear sun, you are still yourself and you would not understand the desirability of the unstable. Do you even understand what it is to have moment? asked the earth to the sun. The sun felt her hydrogen catalyze into small explosions that rippled across her skin and nodded. The living on the earth understood it as an eclipse.

    I love the living for telling me that if I am stranded somewhere, and exhausted, love is an Arabian horse. I feel stranded and exhausted, but I am waiting for the Arabian horse and I envy the living for their ability to be rescued. I love the living for inventing angels so vividly I feel battered by their pinion feathers. If you're wondering, my Sun, it feels exactly like when the flamingos take flight off Lake Victoria.

I love the living for a girl I remember from what they call 1985, what I remember as old and tired, but that's most years these years, who descended out of a bright August sky in the Columbia River Gorge, wearing a wet red tshirt. I love her for her beauty on the descent and her beauty as her neck snapped and her beauty as the blood trickled from her ear into the river. I love permafrost. I love mammoth corpses doomed and frozen from the moment they wandered from the herd. I love viruses and lemurs, nervous systems and potato blights, struggle and collapse, hands and wet hair, magnets and penguin chicks, dance and Colt pistols and blood clots and do you understand what I mean when I say I love dirt?-

 

The sun reached into its clean burning heart and thought it could find a dark greasy smudge of something like understanding.

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