This Wheel on Fire
This wheel on fire allows me to remember the girl who slipped with me into the river full of frogs and cicadas flying about her neck. Her sunburned eyelids lowered as she gifted me with her bare ass diving into the muddy mirror. Believe me, old prophets of love and pestilence, I always looked for redemption in her shoulders of champagne and sunsets brightening her smile. Richard Manuel grinning like a bear after writing a song with Bob Dylan, and my hands reaching for her body as if the heart were igniting this desire wherever my fingers crossed. Let me find a laughing stream to immerse our love and watch a thousand birds circle the earth. A dog barks somewhere in the distance. There’s so much lost in an accordion rippling. Walking down Parnassus Road, I feel thunder under my skin, wanting her arms wrapped around my shoulders. All that remains for me is to walk until she appears naked as the Old Testament, and her tits to light another fire on guitar, with Robbie dampening the strings with the heel of his palm. There can be no true path to love, but I keep hiking down Parnassus Road, finding that I never loved her enough.
Notes on the Poem: Ken Meisel told me of his visit to Big Pink, and suddenly I was walking down Parnassus Road with him to that strangely colored house. An unearthly pink, if you could call it pink at all, but think of Levon on drums, Bob Dylan upstairs in the kitchen typing up another song with all his misspellings. These compositions rose up from the basement in what would be called The Basement Tapes. One of them would become “This Wheel’s on Fire,” and that song burned through me remembering a loved one. I felt all the love I had for her preach to me somehow in a Biblical sense. There was a thunder under my skin, with “This Wheel on Fire.”
Russell Thorburn lives in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The first poet laureate for the Upper Peninsula in 2013 and a recipient for a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, he has published five books of poetry, including Let It Be Told in a Single Breath, Cornerstone Press, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. He is an independent manuscript editor and consultant whose clients have published books in the U.S. and Canada.