Outlet Fire
"A garden of medicinal flowers…"
"Cake!"
Such answers help
insofar as how many days
were you a child? Or can you fix it
with your mind, since it did not happen
in your mind? "Time crashes
into words so often."
•
An experienced fire scholar
observes we hold a species monopoly
over fire, fire
is a profoundly interactive technology, yet people
rarely burn as nature burns.
And out of the wilderburbs
we reinstated fire to remedy a longtime
fire famine. An expected major wind event
took place. Light 'em or fight 'em
and shoving biomass around, hazards
of reintroduction of the lost species of
fire resulted quickly
in a 14,000-acre black-and-silverscape
to anneal our eyes. The flicker
folding denuded understory, traversing undone
growth in its slight rise and curve whose carbon plateau
resists, the way we scanned our bodies to fix
I and got a Pleistocene, some shiny
seeps, "a tickle
at the back of the throat"
•
A come-home urge, a short-term
wedding ring or nerve tonic
of conversation in the car
•
Not unintimate
but a claw into the sector
•
In this area where quelling
worked or gracious
tissue has not surged back. To anneal
is to harden, and I was told
so many times to love the killed place
charred, the charnel
and charmed skeleton-of-ghosts place. Appeared moonlit
in daylight and its narrative
was goblin, homeless
burrow, carburetor. Intelligence instigated this
big elegy
•
Conscious
with its retardant like let's live together. But cut by river, worn
by air, détourned by wind like I won't disappear
if the line of wavy green in the non-shatter glass
maintains its vein
in tangibility. If adrenalin splits
chemicals with this sector. Immolated-to-the-
drop-off place that shimmeringly
waits
•
Snags, slash, deadfall, flesh of
charcoal flower burns its
urging off the tongue. Leaves a
husk-shape perfect, subject
to astonishing dispersal. So carve a channel
in your voice, go coursing
rockily
along the burned-up hologram of I
make a plan
•
The question had been as usual what is
ultimate? Cake of
burning shimmer in the
woods, your
question had been too much
of the wrong kind of fire and not enough of the right
kind. Apocalypse dryads
without new weeds or saplings to befriend, emollient
tar and failure
medicine. We come through
you, null
quadrant, in our vehicle. And fumes of wanting
to be otherwise escaped
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