The Fire Landscape: Poems

Heavy Fog, December

Heavy Fog, December Near December’s end, the news carries Jesus sightings, messiahs fathered By wood grain, Christs created by light And shadow. In this cemetery, A display of Christmas lights gone up, Cars come for Santas and elves, snowmen, Angels, their forms unfocused by fog From warmth improbable as the priest In South Africa who is suing His surgeon for erasing his soul During three hours of heart surgery. Belief, he says, is a cave drawing That disappears when exposed to light, And I think of Abbé Henri Breuil, Who copied cave drawings sixty years And studied them, predicting the growth Of art would be chronological, From the simple and crude to complex, How man progresses, he thought, to God. And though some could be traced on paper Laid over them on cave walls, he found Pigments so miraculously moist They came off on contact, forcing him To his back, under the cave ceilings, Where he sketched those fragile renderings Because photography, too, wouldn’t Work in the weak light he could carry. p106 1FINCKE_pages.qxd 5/21/08 9:31 AM Page 106 Soon after dusk, the cars nose forward From a gate where they pay ten dollars, But now, at noon, I drive through for free. Who spent November draping these frames With colored lights? Maude Martz, whose stone says She died last week, did she dream herself Rising to see, taking the six steps From her grave to the snowman couple? My friend, riding with me, says his wife, Dead for years, explains how loneliness Rubs off as easily as cave art, And I tell him science has dated Those drawings differently than Breuil, The oldest most sophisticated, As if we required less from art After we created eternity. 107 P 1FINCKE_pages.qxd 5/21/08 9:31 AM Page 107 ...