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| sunrise through the lantern |
On What's Been Erased by Flame or Blade
And the things, even as they pass,
understand that we praise them.
transient, they are trusting us
to see them--us, the most transient of all.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The Ninth Elegy
My childhood rooms lit themselves
on fire somehow and burned and while they burned
the collapsible collapsed and the disposable was disposed and
the cats and the ghosts went cold
in the bathtub. When it was all over
and swept clean, when the meeting of the main carrying beams
split and went down and opened
their old throats to their first growth woods songs
I wonder if it was the weight they cracked under, the weight of holding up
for all those years and I wonder if the saw
or the loggers song was resinous after being let off
work finally and the tune went from mourning
to celebration as he turned his back on everything he had
felled. Bedroom. Kitchen. Woodshed. Chicken
barn. And all the rest
anyone would ever need to make a living
in. When it was all knocked flat
and hauled off or plowed into the hole
left open, where when it was dark and in winter
after winter and deep into a lot of springs
the vegetable bins would get thin
and thinner still like the people
above them--and when the old dirt was bull-
dozed and before the new basement was poured thirty or so
feet back from the old cellar
it was like it was nothing, like there was nothing
there at all, not ever
like in 1848 when the land was
looked upon before it had potential
while the pines while the birches while the birds...
Listen:
What's cleared off after all
this time, doesn't it finally sigh and lift first one
lung then the other up to the bone and doesn't it coax an old
muscle to go from being cold to opening
the slow, slow valve as though a mouth were put to
blow upon it, lips close together almost like a piccolo
player, almost like a whistler, almost like
a new flower of flame.
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