alight in the south field
where the sky is bigger than you knew it could be wrapped above fields wrapped by woods north and west
scrub-pine and oak and home
for boar that once leered not fifty feet from your grandma – She didn’t have the dogs.
yet they turned and you think of that miracle often
how if they’d charged it would have been like the dream you had again and again back then—you frozen
in the doorway she in the yard and the buck knocking her back, bringing down hooves that took a chunk of dog not a year before down again down again down again
the hand that holds you trapped in dreams holds you, here as the only tree in the south field burns from the inside
in the grazing field, and the cows –
Herefords, rufous, lowing together
by the chain-cinched gate, stare not at the flames but the stock pond and its endless circling catfish
the pond is full this year and has always been
here before every summer becomes waiting for water, fish so thick you hook-catch their fins as they cram by (the year the pond dries from the other end of the phone you imagine them mounded, flabbed/still/flopping, cluck your tongue and pray for rain)
but it is not yet then, it is now, and you and yours herd around your grandma&pa, your siblings, uncles, dad
stand in grass to their knees, your waist, siblings’ shoulders watching the trunk windowed, a long unfolding joins again before it reaches root
flames held within burn but they must eat air
because the tree is still standing, they must be –
the fire cannot reach the branches and summer leaves encased as it is within the trunk—it cannot reach the green
now and now and forever a poem hangs on the wall of your grandparents’ house in fourth-grade cursive (except the capital letters)
on tracing paper layered on green construction paper facsimile of field and a scrapbook tree symmetric branches sporting oval bunch leaves
when your grandpa saw it glued on the poem about you and he morning deer-watching he knew it was the tree that now burns.
It does not burn like paper
but like there is something else doing the burning like it only holds the heat
outer bark pale and blackened at flame-window’s edges now
flames hot long enough there is only red and white and blackened bark within
the lightning struck unseen and early, the tree was burning when you awoke burning and it will be burning when you return tonight
though the fire will soften and glow the field around. Sporadic chatter about dousing it gave out hours before – nobody wants to stop this.
people peel off and return from chores or play
hauling or cooking or mule rides and someone takes a picture, somewhen, with a camera—you are still when cameras are better
years later, one of the easier stays
you will find the photo in a photobook
text it to the girl you are flirting with from school
look at this time the tree burned
she thinks it neat but sad, the only tree burning like that –
you walk to the field and take another (now phones are better than cameras)
of the tree, still hollow but budding,
explain it is something about how trees are more alive on the outside than the inside, how cored clean as an apple they still leaf out year after year a fire that burned but did not end
nobody wanted to stop this
This was not the first fire you saw in these fields
when the old mare was still alive there were
fireworks over the fields (your dad and his brothers’ doing)
up and out in a sky so full that stars and sparks reflected
and then fell into the north field, a great gout up and spreading
every man running whooping throwing water stamping it out great panicked laughter coming back to tell you, that’s why you always have a bucket of water ready!
you remember this, so many years later at the to-be-condemned with all the other children who lived so far from family
ready a bucket for fireworks in the parking lot (illegal as every lease)
everyone under the awning until a chrysanthemum misfires –
and all is stars and fire and hissing and gold
and all running and laughing that same terrified laugh
dumping the bucket bushes burning and stamping the rest and it is the same the same
stars and sparks reflecting, flames catching
on concrete and in the dirt, away and at home
laughter and terror and fire in the night and so much joy in danger kept small
The field fire, the fireworks, would have eaten the tree whole, now – nothing left to bud or keep beginning.
eaten fence and stable, woods scorched and leveled cows bellowing and bursting through barbed wire – but it was not so, back when the horse was alive there were rainstorms in the summer
you laid on the top bunk and listened to them swallow house and drench fields and rattle sheet-metal barn
summers not restricted to sparklers and poppers, quick-stampers
water left to run unhoarded –
the land was not yet tinder dry
Fires could be put out. Could be held inside a tree and you did not cry when you visited
the embers didn’t catch then, not as they would,
little torrents of flame burning each away from the other until you can only return to this memory of together, watching the tree burn and yet live.
EBEN THOMAS is a poet and writer living in Maine. He writes about animals, sometimes human ones. His work has appeared in The Word’s Faire and the Monster Beauties anthology.
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