Trails Of Fire And Spirits

In his comic books' chimeric air, a doorslam

makes a visible series of ripples

shake the house. That's how he draws it,

in his room now, with his gush-of-tears held back

in anger. Feeding on the anger: he's a fire

ravenous over a page, a notebook page

-this eight-year-old. This sketcher and schemer.

Well maybe they should be on fire: the father

he draws with licks of wild lion's-mane-like flame

around his gumball of a head, and the mother

runs across the page's whiteness arson'ed

neck-to-toe, as if she wears a sheet of Hell itself

for an evening gown. There's even

the magical feel that drawing it causes it,

that upstairs in their bedroom they really are

roaring like two great trashfires in the night, and

if not, then maybe at least a searing pain

about the size of a zipper pull

ignites inside their chests for just the flick of time

it would take a Zippo to burn someone then be snapped

off,

why not?-through middle childhood

the increasing assurance that something(-body) "out of

sight"

maintains somewhere its independent being

is an understanding increasingly

("gotcha!") refined and exploited. This is the science

of voodoo dolls as well-and though we call these

"mumbojumbo" condescendingly, we still stare

at the wall-length map (with crimson pins

for each successful business franchise stippling it

in some moss-grown, remnant brain node, that the map

is actively

generative of conquest. More appealing

an example is the travel (in units of miniature

cornflour footprints) up the axial "Pollen Way"

in a traditional Navajo sand painting: over

a set amount of days, the patient is represented

as journeying through this square, with "Big Fly,"

"Little Wind," the twofold "Spirit Bringers,"

and the pantheonic rest, until a healing

of the body is effected. Of Jackson Pollock

in 1943: ". . . he felt the need to heal himself,

and he felt that since Paris, the former

world art center, had been overtaken by Nazis,

he had to go back to the beginning of art

-to Navajo sand paintings . . . "-this,

as context for the twizzling, rhythmic stride

of almost-figures in his 20-foot-long Mural. When

Ginsberg writes "I declare the war in Vietnam over!"

-is it over? in the "real world"? or in the poet's own

apocalyptic and love-marbled heart? I don't know.

What I do know: there's an eight-year-old,

his day's splenetic rages eased by venting them

in emulation of just these open comic book pages

surrounding his sleep (he sleeps now): people

superturning into live infernos, superflying

over spooky moonscapes, superbestialpowering

themselves,

because our insides do such things, while on the outside

we

survive another 24 hours of simple goodjoe citizenship,

or try to. In these last eight lines, I'd like to think

he's peaceful; that, upstairs, they're sleeping peacefully

amid the cooled-down ashes of parental ire; and

also that you, approaching the finish, will think of this

writing as something that's manipulated you safely

through trails of damaging fire and spirit bringers.