Original Fire Read Online Free PDF

chute, the eye rolls, blood is smeared on the lintel.
    Mallet or bullet they lunge toward their darkness.
     
    But something queer happens when the heart is delivered.
    When a child is born, sometimes the left hand is stronger.
    You can train it to fail, still the knowledge is there.
    That is the knowledge in the hand of a butcher
     
    that adds to its weight. Otto Kröger could fell
    a dray horse with one well-placed punch to the jaw,
    and yet it is well known how thorough he was.
     
    He never sat down without washing his hands,
    and he was a maker, his sausage was echt
    so that even Waleski had little complaint.
    Butch once remarked there was no one so deft
    as my Otto. So true, there is great tact involved
    in parting the flesh from the bones that it loves.
     
    How we cling to the bones. Each joint is a web
    of small tendons and fibers. He knew what I meant
    when I told him I felt something pull from the left,
    and how often it clouded the day before slaughter.
     
    Something queer happens when the heart is delivered.

The Carmelites
    They’re women, not like me but like the sun
    burning cold on a winter afternoon,
    audacious brilliance from a severe height,
    living in the center as the town revolves
    around them in a mess. Of course
    we want to know what gives behind their fence,
    behind the shades, the yellow brick
    convent huge in the black green pines.
    We pass it, every one of us, on rounds
    we make our living at. There’s one
    I’ve spoken to. Tall, gaunt, and dressed in brown,
    her office is to fetch the mail, pay bills,
    and fasten wheat into the Virgin’s arms.
    I’ve thought of her, so ordinary, rising every night,
    scarred like the moon in her observance,
    shaved and bound and bandaged
    in rough blankets like a poor mare’s carcass,
    muttering for courage at the very hour
    cups crack in the cupboards downstairs, and Otto
    turns to me with urgency and power.
    Tremendous love, the cry stuffed back, the statue
    smothered in its virtue till the glass corrodes,
    and the buried structure shows,
    the hoops, the wires, the blackened arcs,
    freeze to acid in the strange heart.

Clouds
    The furnace is stoked. I’m loaded
    on gin. One bottle in the clinkers
    hidden since spring
    when Otto took the vow
    and ceremoniously poured
    the rotgut, the red-eye, the bootlegger’s brew
    down the scoured steel sink,
    overcoming the reek
    of oxblood.
    That was one promise he kept.
    He died two weeks after, not a drop crossed his lips
    in the meantime. I know
    now he kept some insurance,
    one bottle at least
    against his own darkness.
    I’m here, anyway, to give it some use.
     
    From the doorway the clouds pass me through.
    The town stretches to fields. The six avenues
    crossed by seventeen streets,
    the tick, tack, and toe
    of boxes and yards
    settle into the dark.
     
    Dogs worry their chains.
    Men call to their mothers
    and finish. The women sag into the springs.
    What kind of thoughts, Mary Kröger, are these?
    With a headful of spirits,
    how else can I think?
    Under so many clouds,
    such hooded and broken
    old things. They go on
    simply folding, unfolding, like sheets
    hung to dry and forgotten.
     
    And no matter how careful I watch them,
    they take a new shape,
    escaping my concentrations,
    they slip and disperse
    and extinguish themselves.
    They melt before I half unfathom their forms.
    Just as fast, a few bones
    disconnecting beneath us.
    It is too late, I fear, to call these things back.
    Not in this language.
    Not in this life.
     
    I know it. The tongue is unhinged by the sauce.
    But these clouds, creeping toward us
    each night while the milk
    gets scorched in the pan,
    great soaked loaves of bread
    are squandering themselves in the west.
     
    Look at them: Proud, unpausing.
    Open and growing, we cannot destroy them
    or stop them from moving
    down each avenue,
    the dogs turn on their chains,
    children feel through the windows.
    What else should we feel our way through—
     
    We lay our streets over
    the deepest