Fire Gotten Brighter

Remember that memory.

In this dimness when the sounds I make

are foreign, my home is not my own.

when I think of another winter

and the distant whiteness of its walls—

when even the sun seems set

outside the world. In this dimness

the edge of things removed

to thought the numb call touch,

remember that memory—

the young black self

the whole black body painted hot

by the fresh orange scene in the basement

of our old house when I was nine.

When it was my turn

to keep the fire going while my family slept —

my father off divorced somewhere, my older brother resting

after work, and what shadows hovered at the fringe of light

spilt from the furnace’s mouth—

I stuck my shovel in the flame,

had its intensity

its heat travel through a vein in the handle

to a part of my head.

The coals gotten smaller, brighter.

Out of that fire, my frightened shovelling in the night

now a framed power, that young effort

made a little orange scene

kept the whole world excited—

gathered near its center.

In this dimness where I can’t tell

if my longing is my own, it is gotten winter.

Above me I watch a jet

that be’s perfectly still, yet gets so distant,

goes so pointless. I could take a plane,

fly from here to somewhere small

till I’m ashes of myself—

but everything burns repeatedly

or keeps burning. Remember that memory.

I am dark with effort, back at my mother’s house

someone’s thinking of me, and old and smothered flame

gets waked, and it warms the gap

between image and real light.