Fire

The Fire

We were disciples of fire, my brother and I,

the stump-burners.  Behind the barn, two

hollowed-out, head-high, live oak stumps

we chocked full of busted boards and soaked

with gasoline.  Striking our matches in sync,

we called down fire, watched the fulgent trunks

grow holy and blazing with heat.  Out wooden

chimneys, fire-tongues flicked into the sky,

proclaiming in pointed flames:  “I AM who

I AM, who I AM, who I AM.”  All afternoon,

we tended fire in mighty stumps—fed fire

through knot-holes in fire-walled stumps

till dark fell on the day of fire.  In crumbling

furnaces, we saw coals shimmer with three-

personed life–white, red, and black–then,

poking with a stick, sent showers of cinders

into the night, a fire-fall of cinders raining

on our faces like shining spirits falling in the fire-

stormed night.  From the other side of glowing,

I hear my cow-licked and fire-happy brother

say, “Make the fire come down!  Make

the fire come down!” and I think how we knew

one another in cinder-lit dark, our human faces

refined in the forge and fellowship of fire,

how all I learned flashed into form:  the young

brother I could not keep with smoking sword,

the beauty of ash on a child’s skin, the last coal

pulsing in testament against the widening night.

To a day of burning, to furnace-fire in hollowed

stumps, I trace the true knowing of my brother:

his best voice calling down fire—his pure, sweet,

and most lasting face shining in a circle of fire.

Dove

Talking to the Dove

When I was five years old, I could talk to birds—

me sitting in Aunt Mildred’s big-bosomed

lap on the porch swing

                        after dinner, her

smelling sweet like some fried food

or Avon perfume.  In our summer ritual,

she swung me to sleep through slackening heat

above azaleas and daylilies grown dark in the yard.

Across the silent road, a solitary mourning dove

called from permanent, native green,

slash and longleaf pine.

                        (I have since seen

the bird's meek form in nature guides:

dreamless thing perched on a limb, feet slim

as nails driven into wood, black eyes, unblinking,

haloed in heavenly blue, his perfect breast a complexion

of feathers, gray and rouge.)  Mostly, I remember

his call—a low, mournful coo-ah followed

by three long coos—

                        which came as

the word who to me and Aunt Mildred

in the swing.   A pure, sinless sound like bone

breaking, dropped china, hail and rain on tin, fine

sand blown through screen, the last clear vowel heard

before waking or sleep.  When the bird’s call met

us in some contingency of air, my aunt said,

“Talk to the dove—

                        talk to the dove.”

And I answered across the wide field

of night, “Who, Who, Who.”  Not a question

or repetition of doubt, but a greeting called over paved

road, the first words of a language I had just begun to learn.

Stone

Water and Stone

It is here, in a field on the banks of Big Creek,

that I learn how water does a thing called redeem.

In April and May, I wait for a good rain to wash

the dirt from rock.  All night, I lie in bed and listen

to the sound of water falling down, sifting stone

from the ground in a black and broken field.

In daylight, near a bend in the creek through oak

and pine, I walk plowed rows and clay gullies filled

with sand, finding everything lifted from darkness

to light: rusted plows, china chips, marbles, pottery,

arrowheads, and spoons.  In a land without stone,

we are liberal with the name, calling all things stone

that are solid and remain when fall fires and spring

plowing are done.  Our hardest rock is heart pine,

but I have found other stones like bones and bricks

and kernels of corn—seeds grown hard on the stalk,

turned to stone in the heat of the sun.  We even say

a name like time for the cold fire, ashless and dark,

burning in the ground.  I am a gatherer of stone

whose bones will lie somewhere, white in the rain

on black earth, tumbling in the groundswell of fields

and fences beneath open sky.  I am thirty years old

and keep a wooden crate of stones in my room,

not knowing why, but I hold on to what I find,

reassured by iron, flint, and clay—pieces like bone,

solid and firm, broken by time like a dropped plate

or hammered stone.  They are buried in the browning

of grass and raised by water to rest in the light

of the sun.  In darkness, I lie and listen to falling rain.

I hear a word, redeem, in the watery sound—rain

in the night pulls me like a stone from the ground.

Road

The Road

Were not our hearts burning within us

while he talked with us on the road…

 (Luke 24:32)

Late, on the first day of the week, Cleopas and I

hung fire on the Emmaus road, stopped to talk

and rest our cramped legs by a bank of wild, climbing

roses that weren’t even blooming as we walked

that way the week before (little did we know how,

that day, plants all over Judea burst mysteriously

into bloom under a sudden morning rain).  Our boots

caked with mud, so dejectedly we cleaned them

by the rose-bank, retelling the bewildering tales

burned in our heads:  Angels shining like white bolts

of light, saying, “He has risen!  Come and see

the place where he lay!”—those crazed, thunderstruck

women stumbling into the meeting room, smelling

like spilled spice, babbling about angelic earthquakes

and the inhuman stone rolled to the side, the grave

open wide as a mortal wound—even Peter stooped

in the musty tomb, holding pieces of linen grave-

cloth like a puzzle of Jesus he could not deny.

Dark deepening, we slumped back to the wet road,

unable to believe what our own eyes had not seen.

Ten steps toward home and a cloaked man appeared

from nowhere, as if he stepped out of the rose-bank

itself, and—his voice—arose from the very fragrance

and redness of fresh roses.  Our sadness apparent,

we answered questions about the mighty Nazarene

who spoke the dead to life; we told of ringing hammers

on a bald hill, four soldiers terrified by the forsaken

sun—their tiny, impromptu fire.  Speaking kindly,

but with authority, rebuking some coldness in us,

the hooded man unveiled, scroll by scroll, prophecies

about the Christ:  “Behold a virgin will be with child—

A shoot springing from Jesse’s stem will bear fruit—

Like a rose of Sharon, the Messiah will bloom, a lily

among the thorns—On the day of his coming, He

will refine the nations with consuming fire—Bruised

and cursed, He will crush the serpent’s scaley head.”

Even then, we sensed how he pealed back the black

petals of our unbelieving hearts—how his words

burned like bright coals in the dark pits of our minds.

At the door of our house, not able to let such hope

pass on, we asked him to stay for supper and sleep.

While I set the table, Cleopas arranged a rosette

of damp wood in the hearth, the fire catching barely,

smoking and popping to life.  Seated, the man

we almost knew insisted on praying and breaking

bread:  it was the way he held the loaf, the motion

reversed, thumbs starting out on top, pushing down

in the middle, the slow falling of underside crumbs,

and—then—the up-turned backs of the hands—

holding broken bread—there—through the backs

of the hands—the holes—in those wonderful hands—

more glorious than roses and fire.  Cleopas gasped,

and—like smoke vanishing in tongues of flame,

like a bud disappearing in the flower’s full bloom—

He was gone.  And the hard brown pieces of bread

bounced once near the butter on the table top.

Testicle

My Father Loses a Testicle

                             Spring 1994

On Monday, my father has surgery

to remove a large prostate stone

and his left testicle, chronically inflamed—

he tells me this on the phone.

For a year, he has peed blood and carried

the tender weight of himself in his clothes.

That day, he will wake at five

for the long drive, before the sun breaks

the honed edge of the dark, surgical pines.

We forget—the spectacle of mortality

closes ahead and behind. The corn fields

wash away and turn to stone;

the quick creeks harden with silt

and debris—we look, but cannot find

the places of origin any more.

Mayhaw

Hemming and Hawing

            for Louise C. Smith, d. May 21, 2011

She made so many things

in her life: curtains, jellies, cobblers,

the cranberry leisure suits for me, my brothers

and dad, infamous and immortalized

in the 1970s family portrait still hanging

in the deserted hallway, the newly empty house,

our ancestral, now spectral, home.  But the last breath

she made has already left that place, gone

out the porch door, through the glass

and screen, without the familiar bang of people coming

and going, made its way into the back pasture

with the cows and coyotes, the golden

bunchgrass her mother taught her to bind

into brooms for cleaning and making a home.

There, at the edge of the trees leading down to Lost Creek

the breath of her life pauses, hesitates,

almost takes shape, then turns and flows like a stream

toward the cool, wet dark where ripe mayhaws

float in red collects, pooled and bitter, but waiting

to be gathered in and made sweet.

Disappearance

The Day of Disappearance
                                        for Shell

Everything that moves

            disappears, as I learned once

photographing my brother rowing

                        our green jon boat against

a winter sky.  From each end,

            we pushed out through spiked rushes

and button-bushes in low light. 

                        Holding the shutter open

on “bulb” and the camera lens

            fixed on my backlit brother,

I recorded on a single

                        frame our time-lapse glide

to the lake’s center, thinking:

            this is how we see the still-life

of time, how we know the pale

                        secrets of motion and light.

Later, in the prints, his thick

            arms are gone where they moved

the most, the paddle blurs

                        into a brown ghost of wood

dipped in the pond’s silver plane,

            surface water shines like winter

clouds through his already

                        transparent body—but,

                       

then again, this is how we go: 

            first, the arms and legs in motion,

fading; the trunk luminous

                        like photos overexposed;

and, finally, the whelming

            flood of cold water pouring

straight through the empty

                        spaces of bone and heart.

Motion

 

In Motion

on the banks of the Savannah River

Augusta, Georgia

Why does a gull fly so far inland,

Skimming the misted river’s swirl and flow

Like white-sided stone or tooled flint

Blurred in the moment of flight?

Above the brown silt drifted down

And pushed along, water-color trees

Slide by the river’s edge, as if

A hand left them wet

And the paints ran before they dried.

In the odor of movement and motion,

Grey mist bends and turns

In streams through running trees,

And even I, on the soft-sounded land,

Am swept away by the slow river

To the gull-less sea.

Spiders

from My Travels Among the Spiders

Sometimes, during the spring after a rain

I hear the love-ruined voices

of spiders at night, walking in the trees

outside my window, stitching up lamp-light

and darkness in the limbs and leaves.

Several times before, I have stepped

quietly downstairs and hidden behind

the Privet hedge in my garden, shining

with a flashlight for the blue sparks

of spider eyes at night.  I love to watch

the secret spiders play as they defy

our best-kept law, floating, mid-air, in

and out of light.  I often have noticed

their legs, so much longer than stars.

Sometimes, when they are at their worst,

patching up all the trees with passion,

I have known them to stretch some fallen star

into strings of light across one of my usual

garden paths.  On these occasions,

I walk unawares into their feathery embrace.

For a moment, I am held like Gulliver

by the tiniest

of threads until I move

in the surge of my surprise and silver lines

pull loose from their moorings

in the limbs.  It is then, in all directions,

that spiders abandon their play and run

on silken legs to hide their turquoise eyes

in the canopy of shadows and leaves.

Mudslide

My Former Student Dies in a Mudslide

La Conchita, CA, 2005

                                               

I.

In California, rain and fire undo

the living.  In their separate seasons,

infernal winds whip truant sparks

into crematory fires

                                      that jump

from ridge to ridge, and nonchalant rains

loosen the hills and bluffs till the land

falls free of its bones.

II.

A friend called to say that sodden cliffs

collapsed, sweeping Heather away while she napped

on her couch at home in the middle

of the day, her neighborhood reduced

to an inhuman, muddy mess. 

                                                       In the news,

I read that another resident,

a man, drove to the store for milk

and returned to find his whole family

gone, all the furniture, fixtures, and foundation

of his life no longer defying

some revised angle

of repose.

III.

I have to move so many layers of debris to find her—

a dozen hard years of marriage, two babies,

dissertation, new jobs, bottles and bottles

and bottles of wine, diapers and wipes,

a dead dog and son, loud voices

in the tunnel of the night,

my own bad heart—

not sure even now

I can recover

her face.

IV.

In this, I conduct my search

and rescue, shining the halogen light

of words into the long-gone night when I called

Heather and her feckless friend down after

class for their animated

and ceaseless chat—

                                         such youthful energy and gall.

One more plank moved from the rubble of my life,

and I see her incredible outrage,

the flushed and freckled face,

the brown curls wound tight

as springs, the shock,

the injustice

of it all.