A History of Fire
Fire is random
unless
you consider water,
roof tin or cedar,
buckbrush cleared
or not.
Fire smolders, marking the before,
when pine needles curl and it smells
like Christmas,
and the after,
ground awash in ash and smoke,
toxic stink insinuated
into fiber and skin.
Fire crowns, glory leaping
treetop to treetop,
bursting gold against soot-dark sky
lighting birds rising, away.
Fire crackled
high in pitch-soaked pines
as my grandmother
jerked the steering wheel
left then right, dodging
torches that had been limbs,
praying
as she sped down, down
and away.
We still flee from fire–
I emailed my son
a photo of what I’d packed
in my fire-evacuation
suitcase:
a picture of him
partly obscured
by the stuffed dragon
with glittery wings
that once blew fire
into his childish stories.
This was only days
before he died,
far away,
not by fire
but by something
almost
as random.
Smoke lingered
in the ponderosas, seeped
with the clinging heat
into the funeral,
that summer of fire
in the mountains.
Gilded flames jet
from a blood-red heart
framed in tin
on my bookcase,
the burning heart bisected
by barbed wire, a milk-white dove
below it, in flight.
Queen of Recycling
Rejoicing, my mother teased apart the seams
of cardboard boxes, pushed them flatter
than they’d been at the factory,
pressed bags into sharp-edged rectangles
thinner than their former selves.
The doyenne of deconstruction,
she bent all fiber to her will, deemed
the recycle bin the rightful place
for each object touched, used, disregarded.
A tiny can, paper-wrapped, of ham
complicated her task in glorious ways—
She’d unwrap the paper, smooth and fold it
so the blood-red devil danced dead center
on the off-white wrap, corners trued.
The can she’d scrub by hand as if
fine crystal–then she’d crush it amongst
the metal, press the wrap amidst the paper,
the devil forever leaping, smiling.
Lorine Niedecker in Heaven
Your life by water
and flood
a wave-blurred
portrait
as the swale
and swamp of
Wisconsin
seeped
around you
sworn
to water—
Read us your poems
in your floor-scrubber’s
voice, chin tucked
to knees, glasses weak
boards blurred—
You, who slayed
wars with tiny lines
You, who conjured
worlds from library diaries—
Darwin, Linnaeus
Jefferson
You, with minnow bucket,
muskrat, frogs
and mice—
I was the solitary plover
a pencil
for a wing-bone
If only your New York poet-lover
had been
kinder
but you left,
built
your own house—
New-sawed
clean-smelling house
sweet cedar pink
flesh tint
I love you
You
it might have been you
for whom Pizarnik wrote
you have built your house
you have feathered your birds
you have beaten against the wind
with your own bones
You, now on Wallace Stevens’ down-filled
couch, writing,
feet warm, finally—
flawless socks,
boots so fine
the stitching
never tears, the leather
forever sealed–
You, obnubilated
while your one-armed
man cooks dinner—
the wet and need
not even
a memory.
Uprooted
The oak slammed across dry grass,
shattered the sidewalk and stretched its bulk
atop asphalt along a city block.
Once soil-sheltered, now bared
to suffocating air, the roots transform,
a crown thrusting skyward.
Curled tendrils still clutch a boulder wedged
where taproot first pushed through hardpan.
Mica glinting on granite,
the rock conjures a ghost:
a nest of woven twigs cradled
in a crotch of limbs, world upright,
solid, the least skelf back in place,
repaired, impossibly green and frozen.
What the Light Does
The full moon, the light of it, has to push
in through the window, illuminate our chairs
and the sofa and the big aloe vera that almost
died in the sun but seems content living with a twisted
spine in the corner, not gray-green in the moonlight,
which brings not color but shape and form
to the room where we sit, stopped by the light
of him, since early on we decided, not by choice,
that the moonlight was our son Mando.
Any refuge has to have Mando in it, with us
listening to him, laughing as he tells us
where he has been, who he longs for and loves,
and we relinquish the shock
of his absence.
Three chairs, so snug they embrace us,
an endless couch for an expanding circle of his friends
and we all lean forward
as he picks the music, since he already has
with his mixtapes of danceable songs
and we take walks and talk news and stroll along
the tropical trail, elbows in lest we brush a fer-de-lance,
eyes on the graceful trunks of the guayaba trees.
In the trees guayaba has ripened, swollen just enough–
I reach up and pick one, tear open the green-gray
skin and lip its pink into my mouth, savor the barely sweet
until another tree, another guayaba, endless, in our path–
He’s there, smiling, always moving—
amid jasmine
a hummingbird
orchids on sticks clipped to the clothesline.
In the light I cut the grass with a machete.
***