keep the wild inside

A small bird chases an eagle.
A puff of wind blows away a million dollars of gold dust,
a millimeter of rain on a hot road wrecks a caravan of dreams,
and the small fires I feel on my skin
can grill my heart to a crisp.

What small thing makes me feel so much?

-------------

Wrote this after a horrifying accident on the road to Palenque from San Cristobal Las Casas. The model Abbi Hendrix was driving, and when the truck started its skid she made a tiny correction, not more than an inch, to alter our spin so we crashed into the mountain rather than plunged off the side of the road and into the forest. She saved our lives. We drove in a car on fire to Palenque, 40 nerve-wracked kilometers. A week later we were in Calakmul, on our way to Caye Caulker, and on top of the tallest pyramid I saw a fox come out of the brush and sniff the world. The fox couldn't see me, since I was up in the Sun, nor could it taste me, since the winds were at his back. But he heard something: Abbi, walking over the stones, rehearsing these lines about the eagle and the bird, and the fox melted back into the scrub.

"What are you filming?"
"A red-tailed fox."
"I'm ready to shoot, Sean."
"Cool. Make sure to show with your fingers how small a millimeter is."
"A millimeter almost killed me. I know how small it is. Don't worry."

I filmed Abbi as she walked the edge of the pyramid top, speaking my lines about wrecked dreams and the surrender of eagles, and all I could sense were the millimeters, the tiny slivers of chance which brought me here, and not there, somewhere else, where Abbi does not cry as she thinks of her own broken dreams, and where my hip and knee do not throb from complications from the crash a week before, and where no fox comes out for a meal only to back away from a sound of strangers, two people scratching destiny to see how it bleeds in history's stone ruins.

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