Smoke Slips into the Window’s Crack

Five embered pins —
Like red commas on a beige sentence —
Stand as small witnesses
To a silence that will not speak.

The brazier is a black sea, whose throat
Is choked from holding yesteryears’ words in its teeth,
Or the ash in a private ruin, a tiny stupa,
With which you could fit a ruined country
Inside a newly discovered tattered chart.

Smoke wigwags in hesitant Morse;
The floor veins run like a tired river,
Whose bank had receded from parting feet
That never returned. The taste of resin
And iron, bitter-sweet on the tongue,
The memory of raindrops on old tins;
Five stems lean, like telegraph poles
Each with a different biography.

They tremble with heat, pulsating
Like distant lamps on a drowned bridge.
The brazier’s small crater — but smallness is a geography
— Inside it live acts of pilgrimage; the reassuring
Ring of metal under a hopeful palm,
The powder of ash on the side of the thumb,
As time is sifted into a litany.

A breeze of incense, char, sweet, acrid, metallic —
Between the brazier and the floor, a shadow loops like an ear.
How five small fires arrange themselves into a compass,
How a ruined mouth holds the residues of a day,
How a bridge that was once a legend —
A set of stones between folktales — could shapeshift into
This room, with every ember a stepping-stone,
Each crack of coal, a footfall in an ancient march.

When it is all done, the red tips blink
Like tired eyes, nodding off into dream.
Somewhere a matchstick still remembers
The sudden scream of flame.

And you — who smell of sandal paste
And half-burnt time — when you walk away
The shadow of your memories retires for the night
And the hum of fireflies rises like a wave to
Trail you to your nocturnal shore
As the smoke slips into the window’s crack,
To gossip with the rain outside.