Everything that touches you shall burn you, and you will draw your hand
away in pain, until you have withdrawn yourself from all things. —Thomas Merton
This was an ode to fire. But I leaned a ladder
against the sky, plucked stars from their trees,
bagged the moon and buried it beneath a crown
of smooth gray stones. Maybe belowground
its dust still shines. That’s fine. This isn’t an ode
to darkness: I write this in a blinding summer haze.
This was the ode to fire, but I took out every flame
and conflagration, deleted hearth and holocaust,
pyre and glow. Hands cupping fire, I snuffed the blaze.
I go without electric light, write dark, and feed
on uncooked food. It’s hard. Even the bravest saints
can’t dodge the twin fires of passion and martyrdom.
In dim-lit galleries, Renaissance shimmers: paintings
of the sacred heart of Christ drip tongues of blood
and spout fire like plump red Bunsen burners.
Pick a god any god, they all bring the heat: Moloch
the misunderstood, good thief Prometheus, or
the desert god flashing Moses from a burning shrub.
How many gods can a person swallow before becoming
an ode to fire? Every day my mind burns through a fat
wallet of rages. The taste of charcoal’s on my tongue.
Desires clutter one’s mind like a scattershot box
of strike-anywhere matches. Every bodily cell
is a fierce little engine chuffing with metabolic heat.
Only a few more years until I flare out, cold and gone.
So tonight I drink a toast to ashes, the ghost of things
that used to be. But chill the dread. I never said
this isn’t still an ode to fire. The universe provides:
new stars are being born. When Earth goes dim, the dark
blessed hearts of supergiants will pulse a trillion years.
–
Christopher Todd Anderson is a professor of English at Pittsburg State University. Anderson’s poems have appeared in numerous national literary magazines, including River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, Wisconsin Review, Whale Road Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and The Greensboro Review, among others. He is the winner of a 2018 Pushcart Prize.