Cinder Song

Kirk
Glaser

Say the house is a night we inherit
and from a bed on a far shore we hear
the fire rip through air, singing its sudden
erratic deaths in twirls and licks
over the oil-soaked sheets of envy.

I fall asleep and dream of rooms
filled with honey, unable to move
from the bed and lift our child
in my arms so she may grasp
the leaf-lit tree and climb away.

When my mouth opens I cry, Where are you?
but the sweet flame cleaves my tongue
to the mouth’s vault and the unutterable
promises of daylight melt in my throat
choking the names that love wicked up from the heart.

Say we wake from the dream to enter it
smoking and ruined on the dawn hillside,
shards of glass warm as skin, water foaming
among the music of cinders, the tink
tink tunk of a galaxy expiring in ash.

Names come now, yours I took to walk beside me,
our daughter’s I offer to the future, home
again in my scorched throat. I say them
over and over to couch seeds in the burnt field
so blades of grass and fire-wrought flowers fill me.