PHOENIX
I saw the silent, knowing fires that night
tottering blind, a cry away
from my flight into dark.
I fled those fires
unseen in the sun's eye,
to learn their loss at impossible remove.
They grew as I giddied up the scattered path
and night, with animal intensity,
boiled, steeping the sky.
And the night.
It was harsh and hollow
filled with pagan rain
and a silence of infinite birds
emptied from the sky.
It was wild with choking pine-a vague timberline knuckled
to a bone of stone.
It was wide with wind
it was shriveled in a knot of cold
it stung.
Puckered in an hour-glass
the night's time sifted through a universe of sky.
And the fires defied any morning.
How could that cold, electric glow
have signal-sparked my birth?
That phoenix-night
I knew the strength of sun,
I drew the clamp of dark against it,
chalked single hours upon the sky
and stalked each plodding cloud
that plowed down light.
Then light
and down to dimmed fires
(a flock of melting poppies by golden-opal lakes)
I hushed with daylight's tumble
down the mountain to the fires.
Now the morning-mountain
quiet on the sky
hid the wise fires in its hollows.
The day uncoiled
in the valley's roll
and the night's spoils roared in my ribs.
I could begin.
--Linda Joan McCarriston--
1965