Read Original Fire for Free Online Page B

dropped
    or struck between their fingers.
     
    How I feared to have it whispered in their mouths!
     
    Mary Kröger
    growing softer and thinner
    till it dissolved
    like a wafer under all that polishing.

A Mother’s Hell
    The Widow Jacklitch
    All night, all night, the cat wants out again.
    I’ve locked her in the kitchen where she tears
    From wall to wall. Her bullet head leaves marks;
    She swings from tablecloths, dislodges pots.
    When Rudy was alive the cat was all
    You ever could have wanted in a child, it sat so still
    And diligently sucked its whiskers clean. I cram
    A doily in my mouth to still the scream.
     
    All night the sweethearts dandle in the weeds.
    It’s terrible, the little bleats they make
    Outside my window. Girls not out of braids
    Walk by. I see their fingers hike their skirts
    Way up their legs. I say it’s dirt.
    The cat’s got rubbage on her brain
    As well. She backs on anything that’s stiff.
    I try to keep the pencils out of reach.
     
    That Kröger widow practiced what she’d preach
    A mile a minute. If she was a cat
    I’d drown her in a tub of boiling fat
    And nail her up like suet, out in back
    Where birds fly down to take their chance.
    I don’t like things with beaks. I don’t
    like anything that makes a beating sound.
     
    Beat, beat, all night they hammered at the truck
    With bats. But he had locked himself
    In stubbornly as when a boy; I’d knock
    Until my knuckles scabbed and bled
    And blue paint scraped into the wounds. He’d laugh
    Behind his door. I’d hear him pant and thrill.
    A mother’s hell. But I’d feel the good blindness stalk
    Us together. Son and mother world without end forever.

Rudy Comes Back
    I knew at once, when the lights dimmed.
    He was pissing on the works.
    The generator fouled a beat
    and recovered.
    My doors were locked
    anyway, and the big white dog
    unchained in the yard.
     
    Outside, the wall of hollyhocks
    raved for mercy from the wind’s strap.
    The valves of the roses opened,
    so sheltering his step
    with their frayed mouths.
     
    I don’t know how he entered
    the dull bitch at my feet.
    She rose in a nightmare’s hackles,
    glittering, shedding heat
    from her mild eyes.
     
    All night we kept watch,
    never leaving the white-blue ring
    of the kitchen. I could hear him out there,
    scratching in the porch hall, cold
    and furtive as a cat in winter.
    Toward dawn I got the gun.
     
    And he was out there, Rudy J. V. Jacklitch,
    the bachelor who drove his light truck
    through the side of a barn on my account.
    He’d lost flesh. The gray skin of his face dragged.
    His clothes were bunched.
     
    He stood reproachful,
    in one hand the wooden board
    and the pegs, still my crib.
    In the other the ruined bouquet
    of larkspur I wouldn’t take.
     
    I was calm. This was something I’d foreseen.
    After all, he took my name down to hell,
    a thin black coin.
    Repeatedly, repeatedly, to his destruction,
    he called.
    And I had not answered then.
    And I would not answer now.
     
    The flowers chafed to flames of dust in his hands.
    The earth drew the wind in like breath and held on.
    But I did not speak
    or cry out
    until the dawn, until the confounding light.

New Vows
    The night was clean as the bone of a rabbit blown hollow.
    I cast my hood of dogskin
    away, and my shirt of nettles.
    Ten years had been enough. I left my darkened house.
     
    The trick was in living that death to its source.
    When it happened, I wandered toward more than I was.
     
    Widowed by men, I married the dark firs,
    as if I were walking in sleep toward their arms.
    I drank, without fear or desire,
    this odd fire.
     
    Now shadows move freely within me as words.
    These are eternal, these stunned, loosened verbs.
    And I can’t tell you yet
    how truly I belong
     
    to the hiss and shift of wind,
    these slow, variable mouths
    through which, at certain times, I speak in tongues.

Fooling God
    I must become small and hide where he cannot reach.
    I must become dull and heavy as an iron