I live in sevens–in gasps of 7 years. I’m seven years old, I’m fourteen years, I’m twentyone, twentyeight, thirtysomething….I’ve lost track as, seven, I scramble in the gluey heat of a rundown sunset, rusted old sun screeching away beneath the horizon and the air above the old slag dump behind my house stinks of hot metal, vinewired geometries of dead appliances (a washer and a drier tumbled together in a rut, doors wide open, mouths stuffed with the straw of somethings’ nests; a doorless refrigerator; the burst-open puffball of a broken stove, gritty red rust sprayed over the silverblack coke like spores) radiating the day’s heat into the blue hollows of coming night. The coke cinders beneath my feet grind and clink and breathe a faint, wobbly heat of their own into the sweaty air. Feathery heads of sunbleached wild wheat nod in unfelt breezes. Wheatcolored birds–doves, more tan than gray now as if the June oven heat as browned them–whisper soft gray (now tan) coos in the wilted umbrellas of poison sumac leaves, fuzzy stems crooked like skeletal fingers covered in a soft, twilight(not dove-)colored gray. Gray nuggets of wasted coal clink and grind beneath my feet; gray strips of cloud bandage up the far horizon; a grayishblue light lies heavy and wet and hot over the overgrown heaps of coke and the limp, no-rain-for-seven-days mounds of vegetation that smell like rotten cabbage in this heat. It’s just the right time for fireflies: seven of them drift in front of me, green sparks in the damp gray, and behind me my mother’s calling me, “Hey? Hey, where are you?!” back to

my fourteenth birthday, seven pairs of halfbored eyes ringed around me as I lean over a cake shaped like a tombstone (harsh stone white frosting on a marble cake, glossy black strings of icing outlining ghosts and a lopsided skull and my name and my dates, June 26, 1973 - June 26, 1987) and with a single sneeze of air snuff the fireflygreen blossoms of fourteen skeletal candles. My mother cuts the cake and I somehow expect rust, or rustcolored bourbon sucked back in time from my twentyfirst birthday, to come seeping out the slice as Wes grins and hands me a small package wrapped in silvery, cokecolored wrapping paper…

which almost vanishes in the wind of a car’s speed down a sunwhitened strip of asphalt across which my shadow lies stiff and angular like a broken appliance, an ironing board, tissuethin and pale in this awful brightness, everything gone gray but a much lighter shade of gray, all the color steamed out of the world (and myself) and everything turned the color of warm cigarette ashes, a rind of leftover sunshine on the western horizon of my twentyeighth birthday like a single last ember burning away into a thin cloud of smoke.

I’m twentyeight and not married, and I wear a lot of gray.

Thirtyfive and there are thin gray wires (seven of them) lacing their way through my goatee.

Fortytwo and her gray, cigarettebutt eyes can barely hold mine for a moment as the last toenailclipping of sunlight fades, and her body in the tooquick dark is wide and square as a refrigerator missing its door, bulky and hollow, eyes like a washer and a drier packed with ignorant hay.

Fortynine. Hospital sheets, warm and wet as evening air, crumple into a discarded slag dump of cotton and disinfectant beneath my skeletal, grayfurred fingers.

Fiftysix. I’m gray. And always warm, can’t count to seven on fingers anymore, forgetting–

Sixtythree seconds crowded into my mouth as I turn in the slagdump, fireflies numbered in a halo ’round my paindampened oldman’s brow and I run with seven-year-old legs through a fourteen-year-old scree of cadaverous appliances, feet kicking up rust that tastes like a hot June childhood or an operating room, going home to sleep and dream of highways and shadows, women with asphalt eyes, a world too full of sunlight and not enough dark….The soul weighs twentyone grams, little more than a puff of pollen in my young man’s head but a load of hot, dry coke cinders in the last seventh of my life–

and old man shuts his grayed-out eyes and lifts a coke cinder in his hand, flings it hard through a curtain of years stained with faces, smiles as it rings loud and hollow in the hollow evening air when it bounces off the metal petal of a broken stove’s side in a time when all possibilities remain to be fixed.

Seven hundred seventy sevens–an amazing number of possibilities all wrapped up and strewn like rust or broken glass amid the sunken crevasses and limp vegetation of an old, old dump where long ago old workers dumped burnt waste…where now despite the sting of a profligate summer fireflies dance in sevens, technology sighs into rust, wheat and doves grow toward a sevenfold future….