Say Fire

It’s easy to be mesmerized by dancing flames because
I was there for the creation and watched
As the patient attendee’s calloused fingers twitched with concentration
And the sparks flew under their hands like a god of fire in that moment
They made heat from nothing but a pile of cedar, broken limbs and steady hands
The sky erupted with light that didn’t stop
The flames began to roar
The sap began to crack
And the little ants sizzled in the intense heat.
Caught in the controlled chaos,
I lost track of a mind in the moment
But before long, the burn slowed down
The dark red embers started to smolder.
The builder abandoned his post for the night
And I was witness to the dying fire.
Suddenly the change surprised me
As a final fleeting thought I blew on the carcass
The ashes and the embers
But I was not the builder, and this was not my fire.
So I resigned to watch the dying of another great flare…
Watched the great red being gasping for air
And did nothing.
But I suppose fires can always be rebuilt.

 

Stoic

He told me he had never been to the ocean before. Not even a lake or a pond, as if he had never seen water in his life. But he didn’t care, he said. Water scared him anyway.

Nature scared him too, he said. No walls, no security. He’d been attacked by big monsters, he said. That’s why he didn’t like the outside. He much preferred the solitude of his room, to draw out emotions on paper with slender artist hands.

I called them artist hands; anyone else would call them big broken skeletons.

When I first knew him I figured him a narcissist, but then I learned that it was lots of self-respect. It does not hurt to call yourself a god.

Sometimes I fantasize about taking him all the places I feel really at home. I want to share rough rocky moss nights, gritty sand, rotting leaves. I want to share how I grew up because broken jaws and hospitals are not childhood. A fear of orange flavored medicine is not a childhood.

But I doubt he would understand how much roaring water opens up my chest and makes me smile big.

I doubt he would even enjoy it.

Water scares him anyway.

 

whirs

with a cold brassy click I open my pocket watch
and inspect little golden artifacts of an intricate contraption
a mechanism far beyond my simple comprehension of gassy stars and filament lights
and I expect to be met with silence, the glint of a clever glass face in my palm
but I hear the the gentle ticking, the whirling hum of wound up life
that cause it to dance on and on in fits of monotony
a curled black hand hurrying along a path of numbers
but in my inspection of a piece dear to me, that had remained for days abandoned on my carpet floor, I had but
one
curious
inquiry:
who wound up my pocket watch?
because it certainly wasn’t me.

 

The Guardians

For many years the Guardians sat in front of my house

Never leaving their post at the bottom of the hill, like loyal soldiers,
wavering slightly when they were hit by wind, like tired men waiting for their patrol to end.

Towering over the little Catholic Church

That stood between them and my home.

The Guardians were there for me in my childhood, as my imagination grew to imminent proportions in their shade.

They whispered not a word, silent omens who watched me play and grow and hatch ideas and spend early fall days listening to the river in the distance.

I don’t think I knew the pain of the things happening to me as a girl in the real world. And people often ask me “Did it hurt when you found out? And did it hurt when it happened?” But I shrug. Because I think all these years as a child, through everything, I was happy. In the sanctity of The Guardians I found solitude, something I didn’t have even in the empty rooms of my home. 

But now they’re gone, and the Guardians no longer tower over my old home. I think they knew I didn’t need them anymore, and I think they knew it was their time to go.

They knew that the changed landscape I had returned to, with bulldozed gardens and cold concrete and little charm was not the home that I grew up in, of snowy landscapes and warm springs spent sprawled out on picnic tables with my cat.

So The Guardians silently accepted their fate. Maybe a little melancholy, maybe feeling a little abandoned by me in the wake of their demise.

But they didn’t want me to hold on to anything else in this bitter place that resembled little of my old home. So along with my memories, they remain only in my mind. The proud, solid, pine gentlemen who watched over me until I was no longer a little girl.

 

A Pine Romance

I’m frightened that one day I will fall in love with a tree. I’m afraid it will be great and tall, sturdy. A map of crackles across its surface where branches will pull away and reach for the rest of the world. Where soft green needles will tickle and push against a face I don’t have.

Amber globules of sap will cover its trunk and threaten to stain my hands black. Evergreen, whistling no matter the light or weather.

I’m afraid to get warm flakes of summer in my absent eyes. I’m afraid it will make me cry like when I was a child who looked up too high. I’m so frightened I will slip to earth under unsteady feet. Like when she fell, feet from a line of barbed wire with a soft but hard thud.

I’m afraid I will think too fondly of the thunder. That I will smile at the deep humid grumble of the Earth. That I will want to kiss an unearthly godly entity, grey with the weight of water and hissing winds that comfortably destroy the land around you, will stir wind chimes into a loud and harmless frenzy. But I’m frightened the thunder will bring along the sting of hail that will shatter windows like porcelain teacups. I’m afraid the rain will wash away my anonymous face before I can kiss the thunder goodbye.
 

Say Fire

By: Julia Wahle