THINK OF ONE
What are the reasons heat
rises—not cleanly, but
as if choosing what to claim first:
the dry leaves, or the green wood
which resists browning & blackness
before dancing in a mirror of smoke?
Like this: I still don’t understand
how the brownness of her eyes
left me spinning sideways
and splintering into a flame with
razor tipped glances which almost
became the means of our unmaking.
I had thought myself complete,
a manuscript already illuminated,
bound in the leather of certainty,
my quiver full of notched couplets.
But just before in the dawn light,
she traced a circle in red dust,
& asked me to step inside it.
I did. And the circle began to spiral
a mandala into my chest.
Of course fire quivers differently
than we do. It can fill the blanks,
no not the blanks, the spaces
between bodies with light or
a reflection we thought was silence,
which then makes every flame a door.
Or is door the wrong portal? Perhaps
more like a window through which
we see how a deer, drinking
at stream’s edge, lifts its brown head
to acknowledge what’s already
in flight—the blink before
transformation, gash and gift
indistinguishable. Even now,
I am not sure who was the archer
or the deer, if the point came to me
or through me, if she was the singing
bowstring or I was the arrow
grateful at last to have found
something else that hummed
like a purpose: to vibrate enough
that someone, somewhere, might
have had a chance to bathe even
their wounds in the splashes of light.
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