The Parable of the Burning House


We could have burned to death in our sleep,
my roommate says, then brightly asks will I drive her
out to see the flames at the edge of town
bounding through grass and up eucalyptus trees,
each tree a torch that lights the next so it relays itself
across the landscape into the hills above our house,
a river of black smoke roiling overhead,
splitting the sky into blue halves.
We drive to the park, where a little crowd
watches blazes lope through the valley then leap
the freeway towards us like yellow lions.
I am still in my head, thinking of Heraclitus,
the fire philosopher, who says all things are made
of fire and will change back into fire,
but when a light voice asks, Mommy, is our house
going to burn down again? and a heat-blast
prickles our cheeks I shout Let’s get out of here
and we ricochet to the car in cartoonish fear.
Oh, it’s easy to talk about the baptism of fire,
about the forge of the spirit, the purifying flame,
but when the sun is a bloodshot planet in the smoke
and the sky fills with orange nebulae,
people watching on porches start to run.
When we get home, my roommate packs and flees
but I’m on the roof with the garden hose
watering the house down as fire spills downhill
into the graveyard across the street, the trees like brushes
painting the sky red above the sleeping dead.
I’m gauging how much time I have
before I must run, too, when the wind shifts
and I stand on the roof with the limp hose, watching,
guilty, relieved, as other peoples’ houses burn.
Here is a woman riding out of the hills on the handlebars
of a young man’s bicycle while her house flames behind.
Wait, she says, my novel is in the house.
It is ten years’ work, no other copies,
but the young man doesn’t understand.
Don’t worry, he says, it’s only things.
California is burning and it makes the eye burn,
the nose burn, the tongue burn, and as the matter
of the world goes up it makes the mind burn as well,
since all things of the world are on fire, with the fire
of lust, fire of suffering, fire of attachment.
But it isn’t easy to be a Buddha and let go
of the world that houses our things, the mind
that houses the world, of the women who loved me
for a while, of even these words for which
I’ve had such hopes. It isn’t easy at all,
and even if it were, what would be the point of being
that free, of standing alone when the fires die,
like this bathtub on claw feet in black stubble,
this field of chimneys without houses?


                 ---For Maxine Hong Kingston

Discourse on the Crippled God

A man swings through the open doors on crutches,
his long arms thick with muscle like the Christ
whose marble shoulders shouldering the cross
are sculpted mighty as Odysseus’s.
Before he crosses forehead, heart and chest,
the cripple leans one crutch against the wall
and dips his free hand in the carved stone well
of holy water. Hoping to be blessed,
he gazes at the painted ceiling, stays
a moment, hands crossed on a crutch, tame head
bowed. From the altar’s speakers angels sing
while on one leg like a black stork, he prays,
his other pant leg pinned. If he’s not dead,
God listens and as is his way does nothing.