Fractures and Fires

The Way Gasps Fracture Myths

The way full-fathom stops
at an interchange amber
silence a freeway acclimatization,
Thus do ears flush residual
microwave background radiation
that was there for Pompeii
that was there for Clovis Man
that was there for removal of your training wheels.

Rapunzel’s one hiccup
grabs braid tangled mid-toss.
Apneatic freeze tag leaving remnants of Grimm’s,
Andersen’s, Scheherazade’s, Remus’s starchy tableaux.
Your president gurgles!
“Read me a story.”
But daddy and mommy and archbishop, Pharisee,
Leader Triumphant,
all left with nothing important to say.
Set bone! Set bone!

The moment of puffed cheeks,
of gills in the bathtub,
is the moment of no turtles all the way down.
No transubstantiation.
No Mostar-bridge troll for a Billy Goat Gruff.
No urgent-care indulgence for a faux blue-faced sin.

But remember,
before pedal hastens to metal,
the very same sup-sup now sucking your myth,
is the gasp that embalms the precise hypothesis
leaving us still-image now now and now
stifling knowledge-tree apple
returned to the vine,
with incisors’ reverse slo-mo healing made whole.
Asphyxiated shamans say it ain’t so.

But lights turn green.
Road roar resumes.
COBE background hiss offers a second lullaby verse,
while storytellers report gainful employment, for now.

Loring Wirbel
March 29, 2011

Reminders of Indian Gulch

An obvious plume over Morrison,
A Challenger contrail gone mad,
but none of the Hayman haze you’d expect
from a season of aircraft grounding.
Instead a Denver of clarity waxing unseemly,
brilliant Arapahoe sunset violating its own loitering right.

"Why are there fall smells everywhere?” Regina asks,
“I’m thinking s’mores and high jumps into leaf piles.”
“It’s the Golden fires,” I say,
unable to erase the image of a ministry building on the Nile
and a thousand other conflagrations from a year of plumes,
a year where fire and water and air
went looking for earth,
while we went looking for s’mores.

Loring Wirbel
March 23, 2011