Fire Dance

Its red-orange limbs leap and slide
over the wood’s surfaces as if exploring
what to eat next by scent.
What’s burning is behind it, this is escaping
wood-embodied energy with no destination
except out, just ahead of its shadow. The burn crackles,
the iron stove creaks. Matter, says Teilhard, is energy
moving slow enough for us to see it. We warm ourselves
with its heat by-product. We haven’t used flint and steel,
nor a pinch of gunpowder. These accelerant-soaked
starters seem like cheating. Dad, a half-serous Freudian,
suggested rubbing a boy scout and a girl scout together.
We’re from some such burn and not subtle
moving just a little too fast to see ourselves.
If the fire dance had no destination
only this up and out demonstration
then it wouldn’t reach to warm us. Heaven
is any and every moment of awakening,
bits of light evading our familiar mind-cages.

Some of maybe two decades of sunlight
slowed, embodied as tree energy reaching up and out
as root and trunk, branch, leaf,
in a Christmas wood fire.

Mirror and mirroring, trees and us.
Destinations or barriers, disclosing
while remaining hidden?
Whose illusion of stasis is stronger, ours or theirs,
more resistant to evidence of flow?
What loss’s shadow is so deep no other light could reach it?

Sometimes a question is more intriguing
when we not only don’t have an answer
but wouldn’t recognize a shadow of one
brushing past us.

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