Oblivio Gate

Wildfire Triptych

() N`c[Ôi\Ki`gkpZ_ Fire burns: that is the first law. —William Carlos Williams ( N_Xkk_\Jdfb\9i`e^j For two full days the sirens realized their high notes in the quivering saucers stacked inside cupboards, and an exodus of field deer cropped the blooming gladiolus down to a stubble. The wind grew jaundiced, carried with it a sacrament of wood ash to the tongue’s sour root, left me raw-throated and quiet in the car’s backseat. It was a sad evening all day and the deer, like refugees, plodded the centers of streets. I spelled with my finger the words: wash me in soot on the hood of my father’s Coupe DeVille, as I watched a six-point buck pause, then spill a small cache of shit like polished beads, unstrung and falling through the yellow air of the Sears parking lot. (* ) Iff];XeZ\i If the winds swung east my father would climb the wooden ladder, a pail of water weeping from one hand, and wait for the first stars to fall. He’d stamp and douse the cinders where they’d land all night. This secret dancing made weather inside our rooms: thunder through the bones of the house, a flurry of snow descending from the rafters. (+ * MXi`Xk`fejfeJc\\g` To sleep that night was to travel a great distance by train, to drag from iron wheels the crushed chassis of a Ford a mile down the tracks, that, and a clean rooster tail of sparks to set the cattails blazing.`` To sleep that night was to sing trainsong falsetto: the lucid song of metal gouging metal, to hear the storm windows rattle like teeth in the skull, to know fire and the dark brother of fire careening unhinged.``` To sleep that night was to work worm gears and pistons swing shift through the night, to watch flame carve, like a greased machine, the hillside, to wheeze (, and shimmy oiled phone poles, to cleave the roofline like a dawn sun, stalled and dilating above a field.`m To sleep that night was to detonate floorboards in dream, to stoke the locomotive’s blast furnace: fire-belly barreling through the interior, the dried creek beds, the bleached crackle of scrub grass sprouting, at once, into flame. m To sleep that night was to arrive a refugee in a foreign station, to avert one’s eyes and vanish into the unmapped countryside, the still-smoldering landscape. ...