Free Tarot Sour by Robert Zimmerman

palm willow, I do stare up into the sun. My eyes bleed tears that I let sit upon my cheeks, and the wires of muscle try to shut the light out but I snap those with pliers of will and they fall limpid beneath my sockets. I stare until the planes of my eyes become burning solar flares. I imagine two small mounds of fire on the surface of the sun that give way to blooming irises in tandem. I stare to decipher the sun and its secrets, stare until the liquid surface becomes a series of distinguishable strands and fibers. If I choose to concentrate, I am sure that I will be able to pluck any of those strings, let it reverberate with the crackle of embers and the cackle of hydrogen, or I can snap the strings one by one and watch the atoms slide piecemeal away like beads until the sun is nothing but a filament shaking lifelessly within a bulb of hazy atmosphere. But I have no interest in that , in destroying it. I want the knowledge of the sun to seep into me. I want either the answers to the millions of mundane questions or the secrets of the three great ones: What do I do? What had I done? What does it mean that I am?
    As a boy, I feel the sun drain me, pull everything from me, all intelligence, until I am left there dumb, an empty socket of skin attached by gravity to the wide planet. A scarecrow.
    Eventually I become vaguely aware that a caterpillar has descended from a fine diamond string to crawl across my foot. At the time, I believe that caterpillars are the souls of the dead come to watch over us until they are sure that we have adjusted to their absence, at which point they will cocoon themselves. It is only when they sew their angel wings within those webs and hatch as butterflies that they will be able to travel to the afterlife. At the time, there is only one soul I have ever lost to the great sea of death. That is the first memory sent back to me by the sun after we have switched minds.
    My solar flares extinguish, the bloomed irises wilt and are swallowed in the lava. The sun and I had traded eyes and come back. I tear my gaze away with the fear of becoming altogether lost between here and there. I step into the shade, beneath the striated curtain of the great willow, to cool. My face has burnt. It is hot and flaky to the touch and it hurts to cringe or blink. The very pressure of the pads of my fingertips gives a twang to my nerves. I look down. The caterpillar crawls off my shoe into its tangled mess of a nest of cool grass. My dearest , I think. It is for you I sought out the wisdom of the sun . I realize, watching the segmented pulse disappear beneath a thick blade, that my wish has been granted. I have come to know things that I hadn’t known before. I have battled the sun and stolen its sight. Since then, it has hunted me down to steal that knowledge back. I exist in shadows, tucked behind corners, manipulating the principles of occlusion to my advantage. But in my age, I feel as though the earth has come to find me out and is trying to change its spin so as to point me out to its master.
    I see Mrs. Hesse hurry down the sidewalk, bundled in a coat unnecessarily thick for the temperature with the collar turned up. I lift my arm in the air and wave the old rolled-up newspaper I’m clutching at her and scream something about the coming end of the world. She looks at me and pauses. One of the saddest, pitying looks crosses her face and then she hurries on again. Poor woman, one of the few who refuses to transform in my presence. She always was a devoted one, and though I could always tell that her husband wasn’t nearly as interested in my sermons as she was, and of course who can blame the children for lilting their eyes toward the domed ceiling, they always came with her. When Reverend Wiley strolled into town, it was Elizabeth Hesse who led the protests, who wrote the petitions to the archdiocese, who picketed outside the church every Sunday morning. It touches my heart to see how deeply I have