Photo by Thelma Bowles.
FIRE
Fire can be fine or fierce,
can keep you alive
when wind and cold and ice and snow
engulf you,
can kill you
when forests blaze,
when homes burn,
can incinerate remains
of what once was a person
into ashes in an urn,
life forever gone,
no longer
inconveniencing
anyone,
only truth—
what really was,
memories
of trials and triumphs
of loves and labors—
inconvenienced.
Yes, fire can be anything,
just like everything else,
just like earth, air and water,
just like love.
WHITE
In Asia, white is the color of death and mourning.
In Africa, white skins make black kids howl with fear.
In snowy mountains, white causes blindness.
In film, black and white is passé—or postmodern.
In politics and morality, black and white is simplistic.
In the U.S., the (bare) majority calls its pinkish skin white and a minority calls its tan skin black.
We describe villains as black hearted, put black hats on them,
And once upon a time drew laughs with faces painted black.
In Asia and Latin America, where white skin is classier than black, peasants tote parasols.
But white only looks
like the absence of color.
It is the sum of all colors.
THE PATH TAKEN
(With apologies to Robert Frost)
Three paths met me in a winter forest.
One had untrammeled snow,
soft and deep,
inviting for its purity
but repellent, too:
I’d have to break new trail.
One had the deeply cleaved tracks
of many skiers,
stuccoed over
with the steps of dogs
and the dents of snow shoes:
an easy trail to follow
but rough, irregular and round-tumbled.
The third had seen nary a snow shoe nor a dog. Nor even a coyote or a rabbit or a squirrel.
But a single skier or two had passed since the storm. The track was clear etched
in snow clean and white but no longer pristine.
I could follow this skier without haste or peril, no danger of getting lost,
no sweating to push aside mounded powder from the storm.
This trail went almost level,
up a bit and down a bit,
level again and then across small hills.
It’d be the perfect trail to take.
The rough trail of many passersby
went coasting down
a long and graceful hill
for an idyllic run in the woods.
The untrammeled path climbed a steep slope,
up and up to the limit of my vision,
hundreds of feet up,
thousands of feet long,
swooping into the storm-matted wilderness
where snow still clung to every frozen twig and branch and trunk and needle,
where the other side of the hill
was an unknown peril
and the way back down
hard and steep,
where the evergreens guarded a world
that was different,
or so it seemed.
A great poet thought
the road not taken
meant more than the other.
Not me, there’s always
more than one road
you leave behind
but only one you follow.
Despite all their virtues,
real and apparent,
I shunned both
the heavily skied path
and the trail just broken.
I chose instead
to break my own trail
on a steep hill leading
god knows where,
the hardest way of all,
a choice that had
never mattered
to anyone,
and still didn’t.
But it was my way.
SNOW
Is there anything more beautiful
than new fallen snow
lying pure, unsullied
on the brown ground
beneath the forest?
Is there anything uglier
than the black gooey mud
of the forest floor
when the snow melts?
NEW HAMPSHIRE WINTER
It is a small stream
in a small state.
But for
a small boy
of fourteen,
it seems to wind
forever through stark
winter woods,
stretching all the way
from lonely present
to a distant bliss
planted in a pleasant pasture
beyond the dark forest.
As he breathes,
the cold clings
in the air
like icicles.
It carves his lungs
like a scalpel.
It cauterizes wounds
so deep
he’d not known
they were bleeding
until they aren’t.
He skates
from there to there.
He slides
into the future
effortlessly.
He thinks,
he believes,
he knows
he can go
forever.
He swims
buoyed
on a salt-water bed.
He dreams
white on white,
sleet in a frozen fog.
He curls into
maternal embraces
of a ghost who was.
until she wasn’t.
