What the Fire Knows
I have held silence like a living thing,
felt its pulse beneath my ribs,
watched it grow teeth in the dark hours
when even the moon refused to speak.
There is a language in the space between words,
a grammar of breath and hesitation,
where meaning does not arrive but emerges,
slow as light through winter windows,
patient as roots that crack the stone.
I learned this language from the ash of things
I could not save—letters I burned,
names I swallowed, the small deaths
that accumulate like dust on shelves
no one cleans anymore. Each one
a syllable, each syllable a door
opening onto rooms I have never entered
but know by heart.
The fire I tend does not ask for wood.
It asks for attention, for the long gaze
that sees without consuming.
It asks for the willingness to sit
in the company of what is ending
and call it holy.
Watch how the flame teaches itself to bend:
not toward the light, not toward the dark,
but toward the shape of its own becoming,
a curve that answers nothing but the wind
that carries it. This is what I want—
to be so fully what I am that even
the passing of time cannot find purchase,
cannot claim me as its own.
The clock in the hall has stopped again.
I have stopped winding it. There is a freedom
in letting time become a river you no longer
try to navigate, a freedom in watching
the water move without asking where.
I am learning this freedom slowly,
the way one learns a difficult piece of music—
note by note, phrase by phrase,
until the body remembers what the mind
could never hold.
I remember a moment when I understood
that beauty is not what we make
but what we witness. I was standing
in a field of wild mustard, the flowers
so yellow they seemed to burn,
and I felt myself become a part
of their burning, a thread of smoke
rising from the same fire.
That moment has not ended.
It continues in everything I write,
in every line that tries to hold
what cannot be held, in every word
that points toward what has no name.
The mustard flowers are gone now.
But their fire remains, a small sun
living in the marrow of my bones,
teaching me to burn without being consumed,
to be consumed and call it living.
The page before me is empty.
It has always been empty. And yet
I fill it with the only thing I own—
the certainty that something is passing
and that I am here to witness it.
Not to capture it, not to preserve it,
but to stand in its presence and say:
I see you. I see you. I see you.
This is the poem I have been writing
since I first learned to speak.
It has no beginning and no end,
only the middle, the long middle,
where everything that matters happens
in the space between one breath and the next.
I offer it now, not as a gift
but as an acknowledgment—
that we are all fires in various stages
of burning, all lights in various stages
of dimming, all words in various stages
of becoming silence. And that this,
this trembling presence, this moment
when the flame meets the wind and does not
flinch—this is enough.
This is everything.