42opus
is an online magazine of the literary arts.
2 December 2004 | Vol. 4, No. 4
Wildfire Triptych
Fire burns; that is the first law.
– William Carlos Williams
I. What the Smoke Brings
For two full days the sirens
realized their high notes
in the quivering saucers
stacked inside cupboards,
and an exodus of field deer
cropped the blooming gladioli
down to a stubble. The wind
grew jaundiced, carried with it
a small sacrament of wood ash
to the soured root of my tongue,
left me raw-throated and quiet
in the plush backseat of the car.
It was a sad evening all day
and the deer, like refugees,
plodded the centers of streets.
I spelled with my finger
the words: wash me in soot
gathered on the hood
of my father's Coupe DeVille,
as I watched a six-point buck
spill a small cache of shit
like polished beads, unstrung
and falling through the yellow air
of the Sears parking lot.
II. Roof Dancer
If the winds swung east
my father would climb
the wooden ladder,
a pail of water weeping
from one hand, and wait
for the first stars to fall.
He'd stamp and douse
the cinders where they'd land
all night. This secret dancing
made weather inside our rooms:
thunder through the bones
of the house, a flurry of snow
descending from the rafters.
III. Five Variations on Sleep
1.
To sleep that night was to travel
a great distance by train,
to drag from iron wheels
the crushed chassis of a Ford
a mile down the tracks, that,
and a clean rooster tail of sparks
to set the cattails blazing.
2.
To sleep that night was to sing
trainsong falsetto: the lucid song
of metal gouging metal,
to hear the storm windows rattle
like teeth in the skull, to know
fire and the dark brother of fire
careening unhinged.
3.
To sleep that night was to work
worm gears and pistons swing shift
through the night, to watch flame
carve, like a greased machine,
the hillside, to wheeze and shimmy
oiled phone poles and cleave
the roofline like a dawn sun
stalled and dilating in a field.
4.
To sleep that night was to detonate
floorboards in dream, to stoke
the locomotive's blast furnace:
fire belly barreling through the interior,
the dried creek beds, the bleached crackle
of scrub grass sprouting into flame.
5.
To sleep that night was to arrive
a refugee in a foreign station,
to avert your eyes and vanish
into the unmapped countryside,
the still smoldering landscape.
About the author:
Sean Nevin has new poems in The Gettysburg Review, Runes: A Review of Poetry, 5AM, and Blackbird. He teaches creative writing at Arizona State University West and is assistant director of ASU's Young Writer's Program.
Source:
http://42opus.com/v4n4/wildfiretriptych