Eclipsing

A pencil means I can erase you. Repeatedly.

From a yellow chair in this hotel room, the sound 
of red sirens going by.

I am not brave, will not fight fires, trying 
to put my face up to their red beating song.

Miles of prairie burning—control, control.

From the Anglo-Norman French contreroller: 
“to keep a copy of a roll of accounts.”

Fire zippering across the fields, funnel clouds 
of smoke in somewhere Kansas.

Clouds as a summary of grief                  
stained pink by kerosene.                      

A woman at a reading tells me the fire 
is controlled. Mostly.

Tell that to the wind (mostly).

Fire in the lower dark corner of the poem.

(I will erase you.)

I am trying to leave this state, hours 
of leaving and leaving again.

Fire along the highway I tunnel through.

By late afternoon, I pass the eclipse. 
It passes me.

I hold up a cereal box and see through a pinhole 
a black sliver of sun cut out by the moon.

So much burning as they pass and kiss 
after a long loneliness the size of light years.

Light years, fire years, when we touched 
each other from across the words.