fire
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You remember I should not remember this.
How wind
whipped through my legs in a way I might now
consider sexual;
then, invasive. Flannel-clutched, screwed into
my too-small
nightdress, hurried outside into sets of hands
like dishes.
Was it arson or accident? The night turned upside
outwards,
snapped like silks on which the pattern on the world is printed.
In extreme heat
everything looks further away. We passed damp
clothes across
our mouths, watched the frustrum of a neighbor's silo-
like house sizzle
into morning. Being five then I should not now recall
coughing black smoke,
the fact the roof sailed up suddenly like a dhow in a hot sea
wind. But there
it is. What you tell me should not affect me does.
The fact of arson
or accident explained and then dismissed
does not
put the child at rest in bed, knowing the bed
to be a final place
of rest. One tremblor of the earthquake still means
earthquake,
and a rising bathroom tide would indicate flood.
"Accident"
is our safest word. I bring this up two nights after the back door
has been found
unshackled from its frame, hewed roughly in two
by a stranger.
There is nothing lovely about a fire. There is nothing lovely
about dying
shark-blue and swollen, buried by a world. The fact
we are each
fifteen years older does not dismiss the child's fear of choking
on a scarf-length
line of smoke, the taste of ashes in one's mouth. Parents:
they found her
wrapped in a tooth and char layette when they scraped her out,
And somewhere
below our beds at midnight, a young man stands counting
our radios
and change. No universe should care so much about our souls.
But science's
statistic bespeak our own. We know heat seeks heat and fire
goes back to fire.
And maybe crime fuels crime because it's energy, and to keep
this world in motion
we must have it. Forget safety. Tell me more about accident.
What I recall
is not the splintered door or scorched lot but the fact the universe
gave me you.
Accidents fuel accidents that are blessings, too.
What you don't
remember, I do. That night in question--its arson, its accident--
it was the first moment
I knew how to love you.