{ Dean Young: Bathed in Dust and Ash. }

[delga]

Bathed in Dust and Ash
by Dean Young

Maybe Heraclitus was right, maybe
everything is fire. The lovers,
exhausted, unknot like slick ribbons,
the sirens fade to silver ash. Knock
at the door, no one there, voices

coming through the floor, spring
all morning, winter by afternoon,
dense rhymes of foliate argument,
laughter from passing cars. Fire
swallowed and regurgitated from which

all life comes, bees returning
to their hives to dance, hawks feeding
their gaping chicks, variables
in alternate currents you almost
lived, if you had married him,

if you had stayed, a future begun
as marks on a nearly transparent page.
So the shadows vanish and return
carrying their young in their jaws,
and the man who still thinks he’s a man

and not a column of smoke, sits
in his idling car, and the woman
who still thinks she’s a woman and not
climbing a staircase in flames,
bites her lips before she speaks.

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More to come.