Tending Fires

Life and love are flickering flame

Smoldering futile in the half-rotted muck

Of a thousand years of bog

Or underground

Coal-seam sightless flaring

Or bursting dryrotted pineneedle crown-fire

That sucks up the air from the forest floor

A pyric malestromic inferno

Consuming all in fiery seconds

The annihilation of the woods.

But woodland will need

That passionate hellish harrowing

That bursts the fire-broke seedcone

That tears through the mis-formed

Dead-ended past made Solid

That incinerates that crooked timber

That never made anything straight.

Thus, one advocate

The acolyte of the forest-fire affair

And single-night couplings

And lonely aftermaths and

The fatherless son walking

Under strangers' skies

The flare that comes and goes

Leaving man-child mankind

A scorched chaos of livid wilderness

A patchwork of lightning-struck desolation

And desperate procreation

And regret and uncertainty

And nothing certain.

No! Cries a domestic promethean

And acolyte of another path

And makes her case beside

The opened kitchen-door

Burning brand in hand, 

Thus:

A careful hand wrapping paper

And accelerants in wax and twine

A boxes of matches set to hand

And the twigs tented below

An arranged cage of branches

All within the sturdy hearth

Bound in brick

Bound in iron

Bound in brass

A binding proscenium

Behind glass-door enclosures

And beneath a well-cleaned flue

Place your firestarter.

That ardor, the incinerating

Bursting

Passionate

Consummation

Comes and goes

Lighting the small-wood

Lighting the logs

Lighting the yule-log

Burning the year-log.

That year-log fire

Whose flame steadily glows

Burns what is given it

Burning guttering red-orange flames

In the sap-sweet spring

Burning the rich roaring-fire of

The long-months summer

Burning the steady cherry-red

Warmth of the autumn reaping

And gathering in for the long

Winter days' ember-fire

That fire, fed, that heats

The roof-timbers warm

No matter how heavy

The snows weigh

On the shingles above

The life-long fire

That burns the wood of your years

A prophesy of fire

A life teeming with life

With children grown

And your children's children

In their chaos and youth

The family kept safe

Within the home kept warm

By love's long fire's flame.

9/19/14