The Superstition of Fire

The blue comet crossing Orion

says Quetzalcoatl's return is certain, easy in

for foreign greed, disease, and fall—

monumental, but not

the happy return of a god. The sky

is always saying something:

no more of that. Or, more of it

and worse, meteor shower pelting Sodom

before the sinkhole opened a wet mouth

known earlier as 'the deluge,' asteroid

the size of Memphis

striking the Persian Gulf, lifting it

as a single sheet to a fertile

valley of the east, describing

for them a singular god: bad bones

thrown by the Egyptian priest

for a pharaoh drowning

under the Red Sea,

taking the sky flash as a positive

after the miscellany of plague, blood water,

and innocent frogs escaping

a river pelted with hot rose pumice

courtesy of an unimagined volcano.

The quality of news

depends wholly on whose side—

Normans riding horses

under the sword

of Halley's Comet; pointing up

from their forests, Angles mark it the devil's tail.

Some collisions beyond record, initiates

of continental drift, mass extinctions

seeding 'apes with thumbs'

devoted to the enlarged cranium,

like nature, hell-bent on invention.

~

Signature of the last century,

but almost no one

there to read it: butterfly

over the Siberian taiga. Old pines

ripped from their roots, flattened

by two giant hands. As seen from half a mile up—

the explosion searing ground

in rough semi-cirque wings,

enclosing a weird center

where trees are blackened telephone poles.

The Evenkis

will not go near it, the man living closest

struck deaf and silent for seven years.

What he saw, larger than the sun,

a hut made of matchsticks

igniting at once. The river

joined the sky.

And he was thrown into air

with the bellowing reindeer, ground

separating from ground.

Why they will not take him

near the swamp—

where he discovers

not the remnant meteor, just plants

that shouldn't be here, a rapid growth

unknown to science: radiant mystery

volunteering in white

and waxy leaves, those flowers exiting

like the soul its vague case,

bracing the shattered earth aside.

~

In Russia it was unimportant, arctic madness,

an anomalous

aurora less real than the possibility

of revolution. No one knew

what more might come,

predicted by the rogue comet,

uncanny in its year:

to the shock wave

passing twice across the earth,

London's barographs scratched yes,

witnessed there as a startling

garnet sunset, horizons of silver dust,

white night of the ecstatics

and insomniacs without candles

reading, at midnight, the newspapers

of 1908: when the Nobel winner in Chemistry

praises radioactivity, its benefits and healing,

the same bearer of technology

soon to reify the atomic nucleus,

preparing even then

our 'pillar of fire and cloud':

risen in the night sky over Siberia,

accident of space and time,

poorly referenced in Exodus,

Hiroshima, and Nagasaki

as the terrible visages

of an only God.