The World Is on Fire. Joni Tevis
to the vanishing point. The floodwater surrounding the pool is a strange, limpid blue, with a depth impossible to divine. I’ve gone back to the image again and again, trying to figure out why it haunts me. Partly it’s the story that the empty pool contains; what turned a resort into a ghost town?
But more than that, it’s something in the water. This is no ordinary sea, no ordinary sunset, and despite its calm surface, the water reminds me somehow of solvent, mercury thinned with gasoline. This is water with an opinion.
MIRAGE: 1902
The sun doesn’t do all the work, but it does what you can’t. You pour barrels of water into pools you’ve dug, then go round to tend the ones you set out yesterday and the day before. The sun licks the pools dry, like the fire of the Lord on Elijah’s offering, licking up the water on the altar and the water in the trough and the water soaking the wood, then the wood itself and the pieces of the sacrifice and the stones of the altar, cracked open in the flames. Sweat crawls down your neck as you rake these things over, turning the damp spread of new salt into neat piles. Pinch the stuff between your fingers and taste of it. Precious dust, come to you free, waiting in the desert like manna. Bow down in the sand, eyes shut from gratitude or knifelike sun. Nobody here to see you or ask why.
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