The Last Fire of Winter
burns in the hearth. The last
strabismic look from the demon's eye
wanders in its heart,
where jumps and lurches my little man of fire;
the blue grey imp that dances
on the crackle of eaten logs.
He was there when I made dinner
making a display of himself, only a devil's hellbrat,
cackling foolishly at the dogwhistle silence of vegetable
agony as I peeled aubergines and salted their flesh.
He doesn't know my unspoken name or all the secrets
buried beside my bones, my graveyard face,
beneath the coffin boards of my floor.
Still, he smiles that same
laudenum smile as his comely master,
happy to be the go-between
who brings the goatskin missal
where my incubus writes me
all the brimstone news from hell.
But he’s not the one who can read the answer
I throw on the flames that hold back morning,
where the last fire of winter
burns in my heart.
March 2012
5 comments:
Tortured vegetables and unspoken names, a whiff of mystic Yeats perhaps in that 'where jumps and lurches' line and that holding back of the morning all lean in to a place where the writer brings a deep sense of belonging to this world, this hearth, this day. That wee hell brat needs to watch his step.
Desperate poets call for disparate tines, something to fork both eggplant and the fire genie ("the blue grey imp that dances / on the crackle of eaten logs") with his eat-it-all song. It's a cockeyed stare from the wither which searches for the speaker, but her own burning furnishes the poem's late-winter blare ("all the brimstone news from hell"). Indeed. First light is such ash, both reprieve and doom. But o my how the genie loves to dance. A feisty faggot from the verse tomb.
Damn! Auto-da-fe of eggplant and devilry. Did you offer the veggies repentance? I love that the imp only seems to know what he knows, but not your deeper truth, nor the words that let you hold morning at bay. Yet in that last I hear the distant sound that morning comes anyway. Night on Bald Mountain played out in your hearth.
I love it when you write about the imp, the incubus, the fetch, What a vivid and immediate view of the flames you give us here. Your poems are often dire in their way, or sharp-edged, but they also very frequently carry a caveat at the end, and I like it that they do.
Devil’s hellbrat in the flames… a fire so well told! I feel as though the words and images open a crack that I too can sit quietly, small and in the shadows, just beyond the poet witch and the flames. To be there. To witness.
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