On Fire

it was Sunday and I came late to your door

like a bad movie. (This is the part where the train

pulls out of the station in a cold rain and someone

is betrayed, or someone's lost, and all

the handkerchiefs come out.) Nothing is what

we imagined. Neither of us was wrong,

or wronged, and there's nothing to be said

about it, and everything, as someone said of death.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I know it's not

the same, that Sunday will again be just the night

before Monday. Here's how that movie might end:

the train is stopped just in time

by a telegram, its message clear as the forecast-

Come back. All is forgiven. All is not lost.

ON FIRE

Love might ask anything of you.

Or fire might ask anything of

you and say that its name is love.

William Matthews

Someone was playing with fire, I'd hear

them whisper and think, amazed, not me.

How much of childhood is spent

trying to learn language

is a metaphor for metaphor, like snow, which is not

itself solely, but the longing

it engenders and endures, and that only a

stand-in for the past. As for fire, I knew

what I feared most: that it turned

to ashes. In winter childhoods you had to be

careful in those houses not built

for cold, gas heaters licking the ice

from the air, someone's white nightgown

tongued red with flame. The winter

in a fire, it was colder.

His friends, ex-players, middle-aged and home

for the funeral, came by to hear my father

tell how the coach pushed his son

out a window to safety just as the roof

collapsed around him, a hero's

unremarkable story-though all heroes are

unremarkable, that's what makes them

heroes. I believed it to be

a given, what any father would do

for his child. In the unheated front room,

usually closed in such weather, the men's tongues

were stiff as bells, as our limbs

before waking. They were men as big

as my father, bigger even, their hands

so huge they could cradle a football

the way they might gently hold a bird,

stunned and shirred with ice, to warm it.

My father wept then, as if

for the first time, not quietly, as when

my small sister lived and died

in an hour, his sobs like stutters in her throat,

but fully, like a man among men.

I'd never seen that grief

before. If l'd known the language

I might have said it was playing with fire

to understand just what is given,

what is taken away, but I was

dumb. In the cold room my face burned

as I watched. I was on fire with love

and awe for him and, yes,

I confess it, with shame.