POETRY

Burning all
This life, they wrote, is flames.
They saw everywhere the fire, emissary
Of-all-men born, firmly fixed inconstant
That which extracts sunlight from cucumbers
The one who knows how to spin the thread and weave the cloth
Made new on Tuolumne mountain by the old woman who lives in Tuolumne Mountain
Bright-friend, liar, hearth-maker,
Saw the flames and flinched

We consume and are not burned. It begins in fire and ends in fire
Stirring the smoking heap
Running vegetables to soil slowly in the burning heap,
Fixes the bright air
Strips metal from water
Homes million cells in hyphal rows,
Was oak-loved, thin duff germinating
Thorny smooth and warty thick
Owling, moth-ridden, lichen-giving,
Picked, tagged, dragged, hewn
Sawhorse and icon made,
Wet by weeping bucket and a little weather
The body given to spores

Underground, it turns
Effervescent cilia, streaming luminescent cytoplasm
Fireflies in a vacant opera house
Crystalline cell wall caressed by cell membrane
Xylem corridors new filled with chitin life
We bloom

In the season of rains the bowl of the sky fills with mud
In the season of light the hawk with the seed-corn in his mouth paints the earth chlorophyll green
In the season of tilling, we tilled
In the season of insects the young of the chickadee and the young of the black-snake grow fat
In the season of storing potatoes, we forgot the spring was ever possible
In the season of long nights a deer builds a cabin of his ribcage for a sleeping deer-mouse

Within the toiled earth the ghosts of wood writhe
Mycelial fan, earthworm bore
Mole tooth, beetle shell
Roots, shoots, stem, leaf, fruit, man;
Fire-bones born of earth
Stitch the field to forest 
Burn and are consumed again, again, again