Raise your hand
if there’s never been
a violent death nearby.

With one hand in the air
turn and look at how
alone, how
privileged
you’ve just become.

Put your hand down.

Those black feathers
that have appeared
in your hair?
Pay them no mind
until you are home alone
and can pick them out
and place them in a box

where you can stare at them
whenever you feel
a little too divine
and want to remember
how human you are.

It starts with one thing
and leads to another.
It starts here, ends there
inexorably.  It bridges
surely from one to another.

It does such a boring,
steady thing. 

It makes no bones about
its intent.  It goes —
that’s how it was made.

It misses everything
of importance.

It puts step on step
and gathers moss
after gathering moss
even as it rolls.
It aims always straight ahead
on the easy path.

The people who pushed it
believe they’ve made
a revolution
simply because some things
they didn’t like were crushed
along the way.

But look —
here’s point A,
there’s point B.
In between is the same kind of flattening
that has always been;
look away from the trail and you’ll see
the same lovely, untouched,
unremarked things
to which no one ever pays
the slightest
attention.

Sitting awake tonight
despairing
over the modern craze for precision
that pretends as if
there was anything
ruthlessly precise
to this existence:

no matter how breathtaking
its mathematical
progression or how regular
its segments seem

there’s always some aspect
of the world that lies outside
of what we can measure —

its why is so frequently
beyond us, its purpose
a mystery, its being just beyond
the scribing of numbers and diagrams;

what we behold is the effect
of some power not available
to us. 

When we lift our eyes
from the charts
there will be an aura
not readily describable

that makes the object of observation
ineffably itself; something best caught
in the emotion roused
by hearing faint and distant music,

or in the slight dreaming
that we fall into
when we have exhausted
the staring and measuring

and when we at last put down
micrometers in favor of lying still
and letting the moment soak us
in that flow that is more real
than the numbers will have us believe.

We will long then to fumble words
into long sentences and lose our grip
upon precision, dancing the language itself
into freefall that glances over the nature
of things, that makes trees and shells and atoms
come alive inside the suddenly glowing heads of those
who then in ecstasy
surrender the need for exactitude
in favor of being alive
as part of some larger,
perfect, amorphous whole.

This is when I
step back from my work
with burning eyes
and ready myself
for sleep, knowing
I have the answer for the unrest
that has kept me awake
and fretting needlessly:

the answer is to let go,
not worry about understanding
as much as I do,
and fall into the wisdom
beyond precision
that makes a flame
holy beyond all explanation
of the process of combustion
and transfer of energy,

that makes it, after all is explained,

Fire.