Their Fire

Albert Bierstadt

 

Their Fire

Their fire was small. They fed it only enough

To keep them through the night and to keep them

Together and unafraid

Lying between it and the face of the cliff

Where, at the foot under a hanging stone,

They had made their shelter

For a time, as others had in years so distant

Now, they seemed as thick and soft as the stillness

Standing around their sleep

In which the animals also slept (the beavers

And otters whose doors were deep under the water,

Squirrels in their hollows)

Or walked in the sleep of others (the gray foxes,

The martens and black bears, silent, listening).

Had they too wondered,

Those other makers of fire, how long to linger

In this same place, how many living seasons

It would keep them warm,

Would hold them together at a single hearthstone

While the round year turned the sky, thickened the clouds

Or thinned then, turning

The snow and the rain as it turned the wind, turned leaves

And turned the color of their hair like ermine's fur

And turned the earth?

They held their hands out to that restless fire

As if to shield it, to calm it, and they turned

Their faces to its light.

David Wagoner

I wanted to ignore the circumstances and just have poems. But poetry comes out of what we’re living. And what we’re living is so strange that it’s hard to know what to say or do. But it does feel like each family unit (sometimes that means 1, because 1 is a potential family, and comes from a family, whether blood or water, however fractured or subtracted from) is sitting by its fire, ruminating over the past, wondering about the future. We are self-absorbed at this moment, so I like how this poem brings nature back into the scene. I’m so glad to see for myself the cherry trees blossoming, or the Northern Flickers as they drum loudly on any metal available – the season is Spring and it is expanding and blossoming. It reminds me that we will too. I keep my loved ones close, and turn my face to the light. Warm my hands at the fire. What tomorrow brings is tomorrow’s problem. We’re "together now, and unafraid".

 

Reginald Gibbons

Wood

for Maxine Kumin

A cylinder of maple

set in place, feet spread apart—

and the heavy maul, fat as a hammer

but honed like an axe, draws

a semicircle overhead and strikes

through the two new halves

to leave the steel head sunk

a half-inch in the block and the ash

handle rigid in the air.

A smack of the palm, gripping as it hits

the butt end, and the blade

rolls out of the cut. The half-logs

are still rocking on the flagstones.

So much less than what we have been

persuaded to dream, this necessity for wood

might have sufficed, but it is what

we have been taught to disown and forget.

Yet just such hardship is what saves.

For if the stacked cords

speak of felled trees, of countless

five-foot logs flipped end over end downhill

till the blood is wrung from your back

and snowbound warmth must seem

so far off you would rather freeze,

yet each thin tongue torn from the grain

when log-halves were sundered at one stroke

will sing in the stove.

To remind you of hands. Of how

mere touch is song in the silence

where hands live—the song of muddy bark,

the song of sawdust like cornmeal and down,

and the song of one hand over another,

two of us holding the last length of the log

in the sawbuck as inches away the chainsaw

keeps ripping through hickory.

Reginald Gibbons

The hardship that saves. Interesting. We endure the cold and work so we enjoy the warmth (and the singing). I like how Gibbons describes the woodsplitter in action, there is something so innate about getting wood together for winter. That line "to remind you of hands" is so true. Just as a meal reminds you of the hands that planted, that gathered, that prepared - the woodpile and the woodbox, and the fire itself, always leads back to hands. "Mere touch is song in the silence where hands live", how wonderful - the logs singing in the stove, and touch as song in silence. Gibbons has brought together so many things together and joined them in this poem - work, wood, cold, preparation for hardship, warmth, singing, silence, hands, touch - it's lovely. The kind of poem that grows each time I read it. "The song of one hand over another."