Kindling

I’ve seen two stones,
when touched
together, 
each 

shard 
clutched & suffered 
before it shone as if a newborn      star.

I’ve rubbernecked my face upon a river.
It blazed as if a stricken match. Scattered
patchwork, ricrac, riven scribbles… 
Inside an owl’s eye, a bridal chamber, 
a place one darkness greets another. 
Memory ambers over aspens, land
like scrollwork nibbled by unbridled sun.
Crowds of morels. I linger over inter-
looping vines & nettles. Niggle scabs 
on oaks. Poke cicatrized letters. Fiddle 
with the slick mucosa oozing over burls.    
I fondle sap trickling down ponderosa 
bark, pillbugs spilling loose on logs. Rot’s 
a time-lapse anamnesis: all once-living 
organs break in shattered pieces. Shadows
lattice. Boscage, bracken, cockle, tansy
canopy this lace of thickets—potlatch
of orts & hips of deadfall. Aloft,  
one redwing blackbird dips
off twisted bristlecone. 

                                           Now thistledown
pours earthward. Orphic hours, I listen for 
a chorus of vireos, orioles & dusky grouse.
I leer at the delirious greengold of each june
bug crawling over twiggy gravel. Dancefloor 
atoms: ground’s décor. Each fold & ligature
figuring the body. I pick quartz pebbles winking 
pinkish. Seed-heads hover. Milkweed scatters. 
Its script borne up on airy travels. I browse 
for acorn caps & ragwort blossoms, toadflax, 
spurge & scat—a scuttlebutt of agates, fossils, 
frass & molts. Such curios that map me home. 
Unpublishable waste: pips & nubbins, bonemeal, 
pap & ick. Thick kernels in the rubble. Oro-
genic traces, fribble, xenocrysts & marl— 
they rub upon each other, blaze then fizzle,
so much rubbish raptured from the muck.
We are but fragments of eternal fire.