burned, all burned.

dragged from their homes, pilloried,
made to stand trial in rooms
where the air did not bend toward their truths,
no matter how honest they were.
taken from places of power
once they had been judged. burned,
and though the smoke lifted away from their bubbling torment
and settled onto the skin of those who had judged them,
it took them just moments
to wipe the obvious stains away.

and after that,
the burning again, and again,
for it is heat that makes the engines go.
what fuel is used is unimportant.
it will change every time a source is exhausted.
it will not matter to the tenders what new shape it takes,
or how the burning happens…through wood
or atom or zyklon-b, through poverty’s slow
coal seam smolder or in the death by tiny sparks
that comes from daily denial.

all fuel burns the same.
look into any ashes
and you will see yourself there.
do not pretend that if you were fuel once,
you are not now.
do not pretend that if you were a fire tender,
you can never burn.
do not pretend that they see a difference among you.
to them there is drought
and kindling
enough to keep this world
on fire forever,
as long as one man
with one match
can be made
to strike it.

so come.

come to the place of burning.
come as water this time.
come in the name of everyone once burned.
come up
from the unjust ashes
and drown that match. come up
from the wet of soaked old pyres
and drown it. come up
from the freezing graves of the middle passage
and drown it. come up
from sand creek’s shoals
and drown it. come up
from memory’s camps,
from the chimneys of horror,
from the alleys of walled remainder,
from the forests of hidden famine,
from the conflagrations of invasion,
colony, assimilation, genocide,
and every other firestarter,
come together to drown it…

but do not come with lightning
when you come.
bring no fire of your own.
come as rain only,
joining with stream and spring,
come a little at a time
until we build,
long and soaking,
to a steady downpour
swollen
with a billion times
a billion drops.

no end can come to this blaze
until we believe in our watery hearts
that every scrap of fuel
tastes the same to the tongue of a flame,
and that nothing left dry
will ever be proof
against it.

wrong finger
in the air —
stop testing the idiot wind
and start rejecting it

As far as I can discover, it doesn’t exist —
there is no Sweetwater, NY.

So the dream that ended there,
the dream in which I drove all the way to Sweetwater while asleep
has to be symbolic, as does the extra steering wheel
I spent an afternoon installing while parked in a driveway
on a farm where no one was home while the sun fell lower and lower
off to my left as I pulled unfamiliar things from the glove box:
the disc camera, the grey gloves covered in soot, the baby toys.

And the family that came home and were remarkably unperturbed
to find the shaggy man flat on his back in their driveway
must represent something, perhaps some forgotten obligation
to settlement and peace, as they welcomed me in and offered me cornbread
as if I was an old friend. When I finally recognized the mother
as someone I’d known years ago and we hugged so comfortably,
when I finally kissed them all farewell with their address
on a postcard tucked into my pocket (and I would know that handwriting
if I saw it now, awake now as I am) so I could find them again
if I came that way, it must have meant something, and I drove home
certain of all these things, steering from the passenger seat with the setting sun
behind me, cruising home through a flat landscape
that looked like gold spread all around me.

I choose to believe in the meaning of this,
just as I choose to believe
that the beginning of the dream
was of no importance, was just an introduction,
was just some experience translated
from the room around me as I slept: the waking up in terror,
still driving but not on the road anymore,
straight out across flat stubbled fields,
forcing myself to turn back toward that road that would lead me
to the farm in Sweetwater where the rest of the vision would unfold —

I can still taste
the cornbread, sweet and crumbly with fresh butter;
I have nearly forgotten
the sound of the shattered cornstalks
under my wheels
as I drove.

she announces that finally she can say out loud
some things she’s been waiting to say
now that both of her parents
have passed

I think I have said
those things already
so what will I say
when mine have gone

will I give up war
focus on peace
will I give up
entirely

shall I be the one
to come back
to the subject
clean things up

or will everything remain
as it is now but with me at last
standing under my own precarious sword
now that they are no longer game

I have nothing to announce here
for the moment
but in the way her shoulders have risen
from their customary slump

I suspect that there will be
work for me to do
long after I am in a position
to decide how to react to the same thing

we once fantasized
that we were
born feathered

always saw ourselves
with wings
with layers and wisps aflutter
all around
as we lifted off

assumed
that we could take with us
everything we always carried
expected our bones
to remain solid

forgetting how hollow
a bird actually is

and none of us noticed
that all birds land
eventually

today I saw you
still in flight
but with plumage rough as a wet hen
as you nattered on to the nestlings
that live on inside you

we were too young
to fly
when we laid the pills
upon our tongues and swallowed
with our heads raised toward
mother sky

in all these years
you have managed not
to come down to where we are

and you’re so tired now
I almost want to draw a bead
upon you and
fire

in the hope of offering some rest
hoping that your last feathers
will give you their long withheld comfort
as they fall soft around you
when you stretch out upon
hard and inevitable ground