1.
He stepped across the metal ramp and fell,
feeling his stomach vanish as he pierced
the first tower of smoke. Coughing at the smell
of heat-burst pines, he yanked the cord, first
to jump, and entered a cleaner tube of air.
He was not thinking of his wife back home.
He was not thinking of his plummeting crew.
He had no thoughts as he spiraled through
hot ash, watching each detail acutely bloom
below: serrated ridge of scrambled rocks,
bellies and bulbs of smoke, a copse that birthed
one quick, jabbing tongue of yellow flame.
Having no thoughts, he had joy. Until a shock
climbed his boots. Remarried to the earth,
he rose in a place where nothing knew his name.
2.
The burning valley belched a charcoal smear.
Divided from his crew by vines of smoke,
he was lost. His breath was ash; he soaked
his hair with bottled water. Stiff with fear,
he had the vibrant sense of being prey
to something igneous and implacable.
He thought he glimpsed a shape, obscured by scree,
and wrapped his fingers around his red shovel.
It was a cougar’s corpse, burnt alive
and bramble-caught. Thorns transfixed its pose:
snarling, tendons cooked, coiled to dive
at a mute monster of heat. The fire had frozen
its eyes; empty sockets blazed raw dark.
Something seemed to stir within that murk.
3.
Gloom where God or light or laughter lurked.
The man drew back, and raised his shovel to strike
the dark, to douse the eyes, but a spike
of wonder pierced his heart. His mind worked.
He sat on ashen rocks to consider the cat.
Its sharp carnivorous pose reminded the man
of nothing in particular, but it spat
ancient pictures deep into his brain:
Moses, rancid-toothed and dying, banned
from Canaan, cursing feebly at his God.
And Cain, pale and sweat-slick, flinging clods
of soil across a mound, using sand
to plug the vacant eyes, begging like a child:
Wake up, wake up. The images were cold
4.
and wild but he endured them, still unsure
if he was seeing anything real, or just
a fear-collage, a spasm of his mind.
He had the urge again, hot as lust,
to smash the eyes, but underneath that rind
he sensed a kind of innocence, a bizarre
affection, rising for the dead and noble thing.
His vision blurred. Then sudden chuckles and cries
destroyed his solitude. Steps crunched higher.
His crew arrived, their voices flushed with fire.
They looped around him. He rubbed his eyes.
They asked where he’d been. Feeling the sting
of their camaraderie, he could not speak.
They offered sandwiches whose onions reeked.
5.
Chewing together, at ease, they asked again.
He hesitated, nodded at the corpse.
They squinted, cried out. One hauled the warped
body out of thorns. One scratched its chin
and laughed, flashing half-chewed bread.
The man felt a hot froth of anger rise
and seal his throat. He held the shovel-head
and squeezed his hatred out. The cougar’s eyes,
those darkly knowing pits, seemed to bid
him rise, attack. Commanded him to strike
his crew and scatter them. The moment bled
away. He did nothing. Then someone took
a pulaski. Chopped into the charred neck.
The head detached, fell, bounced through rocks.
6.
When he got home, he tried to tell his wife
about the corpse, about the dark where God
had lurked and laughed, but some mute thief
stole the substance from his words, and cold
incomprehension hardened on her face.
Owlish and tall, she loathed the hint of smoke,
and hid her amber teeth whenever she spoke.
Hearing her husband’s voice, she felt erased,
cheated of tenderness, because he’d failed
to ask about the days when he’d been gone.
She tried to chasten him with barbed looks.
She cannot hear, he fumed. Faces pale,
they fought, alone in a suddenly alien room,
and went apart to think identical thoughts.
7.
Storming out to pace beneath the pines,
she felt the needles under her feet bend
and crack, wondering what crude design
had fastened her to this particular man,
to this irascible place and feeble self.
Her loneliness was threadbare now. Not bright
and tragic as it used to be. If she sniffed
her ardors, they were odorless. A light
misting rain depressed the silent pines.
Her nape-stuck hair passed transparent beads
along its length. Soon he’d leave again.
Nothing mattered. There was in him a greed
she could not name. Hounding signs from God,
he pulled a Christ from every clump of mud.
8.
He could not see the wife, alive and real
before him, who did not ask for God or light,
but only craved an hour of words, a night
of true and chiming talk, to make her feel
like she existed, so air would have to part
around her form. Toes gouged the earth.
When each person dies, is there really a heart
that beats differently? She was alert.
Awake to rain. The sky tore down a shower.
In those descending globes she sensed a clue,
some uncanny answer dappling her solitude.
Before she netted it in words, the power
withdrew. Her shirt was soaked. She was cold.
She walked home, brewed tea, and grew old.