In the Manner of What Sometimes Burns the Tongue
What is it about the way heat
consumes—not all at once, but
as if choosing what to flame first:
the dry leaves, then the green wood
which resists browning and blackness
before becoming a mirror of smoke?
Like this: how she entered
my life dancing sideways
and feathered as a flame with
razor tipped glances that became
the arrows of my unmaking.
I had thought myself complete,
a manuscript already illuminated,
bound in the leather of certainty,
my quiver full of notched couplets.
But then, there in the courtyard,
she traced a circle in dust,
& asked me to step inside it.
I did. And the circle began to spiral
into my chest like an LP.
Of course fire quivers differently
than we do. It fills the spaces
between words with light or
a flight we thought was silence,
and makes both of them a door. Or
is door the wrong word? Perhaps
more like a window through which
we see how a deer, drinking
at stream’s edge, lifts its head
to acknowledge the arrow already
in flight—a quiver before
transformation, wound and gift
indistinguishable. Even now,
writing this, I am not sure
who is the archer or the deer,
if love happened to me or through me,
if my beloved was the arrow or I was
the singing bowstring, grateful at last
to have found a purpose: to vibrate
enough that someone, somewhere,
might warm their hands against the light
and find what it means to be
consumed so completely that
what remains is not ash but
something that also aims to tremble
through the air before it lands.
