Fire’s Heat

The air holds the heat, ready
to alight in swerving tongues,

hungry flickering mouths
gulping explosively,

recursively mimicking
the original apogeal spark.

That big cat called Aim,
lightning arrowing into cloud, condensing
into honeyed raindrops,
every hit painting a bullseye
across the rippling landscape, steaming.

From vapour,

to fume,

to flame.

Light, starved, seizing each burst
anew,

pastless,

unfooled.

Fire reaching breathlessly
toward to the wind,
whispering supplicant curls,
inflaming the air into smoke, hurling
the light into dark, occlusively thick heat.

Only the ashes remember:
the easiness of the first,
the hot-ness before desire’s grip,
before one and its other,
before light and the space it feeds.

Here: warmth potentiates from zero,
irreducibly formlessly existent,

not the spark that ignites the fire,

not the person creating the spark,

heat itself,
instilling the idea of flame,
that undergirding, unseeable
element of desire, the grasping hand
satisfied, empty.

Here: an aeonian flame rests in unbeginning,
dormant in air, incensed ceaseless hum
ahead,
below,
above.

Its truth projects,
gliding parallax,
fire, a beaming hologram
of depth: the torch seen entering the cave.

To be guided by this firelight?

No, the windrose leads
from the center out, the firelight
lights the fire within, patterning
the torch as a tool and a state.

Within the cave a river,
across the river a lake,
the depth’s pulling magnetic—
the shore marked by torch, abandoned,
merely pointing to what’s at stake.

The source of each direction,
the sub-elemental stuff of reality, glows
in perpetuity
in water,
in flame,
in breath,
in stone.

Resting, aimlessly, in its natural curve,
alone in every shape,
at home in every trait,
endlessly patient in its reminder:

Know Thyself composed of a fifth,
simultaneously the fiery monolithic glow
and already nothing, burnt to a crisp.