Art by Amber Liang

for Sam & Eleanor

The fire  

is really going now,  

a cone of light edging out of the darkness.  

Joan Baez’s voice chimes above the peaks of flame,  

a hundred miles, a hundred miles, the fire’s flare an impish folk dance.  

Embers fall to the soils, flickering in that dark radius like cities seen from space. 

I say something like this, then Eleanor kneels above the raging earth,  

above the countless bright devourings. She puts a city out beneath her finger,  

her face a reddened half-moon split 

by laughter. 

It goes on this way,   

watching the rest burn down in time. 

In time, the light gasps the last of its griefs, then Sam  

turns, says there’s always summer, and we nod like daisies  

bobbing in the pale night.  

For now the fire trails  

too small a wake, a wind sweeps us ever   

onward, so we wind our way through the field, circling like shadow-children  

the bent-back willows, the lonely elms, upturning  

the wintered ruins of leaf-rot and bug husks, while night- 

birds claw their small flights into the dark.  

Then the breeze pitches our breathless bodies round  

the bend, spits us out of its slipstream,   

deposits like salts our straggled  

selves on a road flashed white by headlights— 

and there is already so much distance between us and the ash-heap  

(and only so many miles until sleep will outpace us),   

but for a night, didn’t we make another world? 

Gone now, but how it blazed, 

how it blazed