Soul Sacrifice
It’s been invention since morning —
early rise, in order to grind beans
& boil water. Impulse. Inhale.
My whole life my lungs
have passed themselves off as
massive, as treelike as organs
will get. I enter rooms of new air —
they are many — & my urge to
breathe in so thoroughly draws
closer in symptom to a wandering,
as during hallucination. But no,
no sort of bodily wandering.
Santana has a song about this,
called “Soul Sacrifice.” I have
in mind the 8-minute rendition
performed at Woodstock in 1969.
As it happened, contrary to the story
told by footage & audio recording,
Carlos Santana’s Gibson guitar
metamorphosed mid-performance
into a serpent god, one that’s gone
unnamed in the varied tradition.
Song underway, Santana had to
negotiate the space between
the shapeshifter he was obliged to
pick & strum & an open-air
stage he had to keep sustained —
like an illusion — inside his lungs
for the concertgoers. The mano-a-
mano, instrumental to the triumph
of the performance, couldn’t have
been simple meld of myth & music,
nor mere result of potentiating
LSD with mescaline — that cosmic
cocktail. To my mind, only pure
invention could ordain it —
only a resolve to hold, in the lungs,
an atmosphere itself holding in that
breathing instrument, which writhes
& coils itself in & around the arms.