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Fire and Water 4th of July
Don’t
play with matches, I always chided,
a hard rule in the summer of his sixth year.
So that 4th of July morning I took him off to fish
for the first time, hooked the worm to show him
how it’s
done, to fish with this fatherless son,
my only one. I kept an eye on him there, limp rod
in hand, arm propped on knee, chin resting on his fist,
staring aimlessly across the wakeless riverbank
as a line from Elizabeth Bishop rose in me:
his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen,
then packed everything up and headed home.
He didn’t
want the water but the fire, a night alight
with sprays of stars we could make come and go,
so I lit an M80. Its whoosh, whistle, and bang skittered
unbridled across the walk, no explosion skyward, instead
a slapdash leap into a tree, not the kind a child could climb,
but parched and spindly. A plume of flame dug in its teeth
of heat cracking branches. Despite a dousing, foliage turned
a splayed shadow of a thing, smoking limbs pointing
to the moon and artificial stars of constructed constellations.
It was then I thought of Robert Frost’s
love of a tree:
let there never be curtain drawn between you and me
and pined for what would be the absence of nesting birds,
pulled my boy inside, lowered the sash and blind.
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