You are better. You are better. You are better.
Grooves are grooves indeed to the pattern
of these early winter nights when once a man and a wife
set fires to shacks and bit houses set far into the trees
that had been homes lifetimes back.
Those battered brash wood and vine lots
gave up much, a firery top to the ice
and wind and a fireman's lunch
packed in the short time the men who fight fires
come home. And what do they come home to?
Children's patchy work, a wife's want bone,
the supper cold, and tree decorated
while some fire consumed a once home
on the back roads. And the arsonist daughter?
What of her? What of her and her own?
The boys that have snuck past the porch
when father and lover were out? The boys
and their meals of her and her own?
The men made there on the couch, or bed,
a different fire altogether, but no less hot
or burdonsome. Something comes round of it.
And when the truth is revealed all who lied
do not know how to wear a face, so chapped,
so red, from fire or by ice, by the running
from the fire, or by the running through love,
as if either were a gate to end or start a life.
