Fireworks, and: The Basset

Fireworks

For Richard Leckband 1940-2002

A few reports at midnight the night before
opened spaces in the sky and in my sleep,
and by the early morning of the Fourth
the bittersweet smell was lurking in the air.
For weeks I'd stared at mauve, green,
and red rice paper packets of firecrackers
covered with mystical Chinese characters,
contraband I'd saved for all that winter-
round cherry bombs, bottle rockets,
whizzbangs, Roman candles, ladyfingers,
shipped in a plain brown cardboard box.

Behind Dick Leckband's house that afternoon
we blew up toy entrenchments, bushes, crabgrass,
whole strings dissolving, drifting down in flakes,
cans rocketing through the air over cannoncrackers,
rattling windows until a cruiser idled by,
its red light flashing like a Roman candle.

At dusk with cousins, aunts, and uncles,
we hurried to the park and the town's display,
spreading blankets in the growing dark,
waiting forever, dizzy with yearning, until
unannounced, except for a fizz of sparks,
a solo rocket cracked open the heavens.
Sighing together in a wave, we watched
pure silver scrawl across the sky, golden rain,
green crowns of light and red Ezekiel's wheels,
purple cataracts, orange asters, yellow fountains-
the whole earth blooming in the heavens
again and again and again while we gazed up
from the dark void at fire spreading out
in a recurring pattern each time different:
the secret work of gravity and light
by which everything came suddenly out of nothing,
fading back into it, rising and falling,
until the end when the American flag
unfurled and blazed brilliantly on its wire
down to a coal, leaving a sweet haze
we walked home through in the double dark
among the crowds murmuring like leaves.
Eyes, ears sated, too tired almost to move,
we stumbled beside our parents who were lost
in talk of ordinary things as if they hadn't
just seen the worlds created and expire.

Drunk on the lingering smoke and its fled music,
hot and sticky, we climbed upstairs
to the sheets glowing in the white summer night
where, scarcely out of our clothes, we fell asleep
to dream in that fecund darkness of the light,
the beginning and end and all things in between.

The Basset

A poem is a walk

- A.R. Ammons

What I do not like about the sonnet is this:
the sense I get beginning to read one
that there will be a thought, profound or less
than profound, the author has dragged in,

sad as a basset in a be-lilacked yard,
who ambles out to examine with rheumy eye
all passers-by on his short street, regarding
each with a look long and melancholy.

About here the thought usually takes a turn
(or basset, that is - lugubrious metaphor!) to stand
and stare at me again with grave concern-
this and nothing more. And yet I can't
escape that look with its convicting chill,
my footsteps echoing each syllable.