Carrying Water To The Burning House
Carrying water to the burning house,
the bottom of the bucket falls out,
a ship on the rocks, a hemorrhaging bell
that broke one of the blood vessels
in its throat like a pipeline to its vocal cords.
I see a woman who went back into the fire
for her purse, her hands pleading against the window
like a Neanderthal cave painting,
melting into the glass like a fly in amber.
Charred vision of a dangerous day in the sunlight.
I don't want to be writing about this.
I want to be writing about red-winged blackbirds
swaying on the cattails like dozy metronomes
and something sufficiently eternal in the suffusion of sun.
Undisciplined, as if life were all I had to do.
Deep within me someone is angry and weeping.
There's a wound that wants to take over my mouth
and bleed all over the page like blood on the snow
of a small, warm animal dying under a juniper bush.
I'm usually too uncertain of myself to be
dedicated to this kind of suicide,
but I suspect I've fallen into a black hole
and there's no starmap out of this one.
I'm trying to generate light out of my own body
like a firefly, but I'm only wasting matches
by trying to ignite them in a mirage of rain.
Is it my wound? Is it hers? Am I finished with dying?
It would take a crystallographer to know
how my diamonds hurt like wounded coal.
Whose life is it I'm trying to save
like a madman with a grammar of my own
that talks in tongues to the immaculate indifference
of an abyss that been listening for light years
to me scattering my ashes on the wind
in pointillist flocks of red-winged blackbirds
emerging out of chaos into urgent paradigms
of minerals that learned to replicate their fractals.
Either that, or panspermic microbes in
time capsule meteors landing in the Gobi desert
like the ejecta of Mars or Europa, fire or black ice,
the fashionistas of a planet in hand me down clothes.
Second or third pressing of the grape.
Someone stepped on the coke with stars.
There's an arsonist in the methane like a fire storm
trying to melt its own polarized ice caps
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poem by Patrick White
Added by Poetry Lover
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