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| Cosmos 'Sonata White' |
The Burned House
When
I wasn’t looking, the house burned down,
that
tall one on the cliff’s edge that sucked in smoke
and
died. It was full of mirrored rooms, that house
I
used to own, each one a tank where dreamfish swam in fire,
where light flickered up on scales of copper-gold, now white
lumps
of half-burned bone, refleshed with sudden coats of ash.
How
were those rooms so full of light transformed to ash?
to
flecks scraped from scorched love letters skittering down
the
drive, black ink on blue paper burned feathery white?
Our words undressed became a script of smoke,
banded envelopes a fuel for chemical fire
that
when my head was turned burned down the house.
Blackened
beams, obscene leg-stumps of
house
frame possibilities negated. Nothing made of ash
can
be reused. I sift the morsels left uneaten by the fire
that
swallowed up the core, the spit-out shingles flying down
in
flaps of flame, exhaling heat while carcinogenic
smoke
escaped from window-mouths on wings of restless white.
When
it happened I was working soil for the Sonata Whites
but purity failed; so fire’s finger drew a circle round the house:
C. sulphureus instead, petals solar bright, tangerine smoke
drifting
against the threshold wild alive, drawing flame from ash,
from rich dead dreamfish char piled in drifts of down;
now
where white rebelled I fill my hand with redgold fire.
So
I come to the doorway drawn by memory's
fire
to
rake through dulled nails and teeth of white
half-melted days, look for the last inhabitants down
beneath
the rotten timbers. The ghost-house
trembles,
gives up its bones and sleeps in ash.
I
pick and fuss at ruins, only to fill my bag with smoke:
photographs
once rainbow stained to sepia, smoke-
colored
faces turned to relics, eyeholes eaten black by fire
unreal
as fingerbones of non-existent saints, grey as ash
and
as unlikely to reignite; silver-colored trinkets faded white,
misshapen
in the reflux of the firehose, lockets that housed
twists of burn-clipped hair lost in love's long down.
My
insurance covers none of this disaster-whitened ash,
a
total loss except for cosmos smoke, gold-warm as any fire,
embers at the doorway of the wild that can’t burn down.
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| C. sulphureus |
~originally written September
2011,
ruthlessly revised
for Brendan's Doors
Forgive the repost, but my time is not my own these days...
Cosmos
is a perennial or half-hardy annual in the aster family, native to
Mexico, Arizona, Florida and the southern U.S. down into Central and
South America. It grows in both wild and cultivated form. It is heat and
drought tolerant and reseeds itself so freely some forms, including C. sulphureus, are considered a weed in some places. Cosmos bipinnatus 'Sonata White" is a pure white hybrid form, bred for the cut flower trade.
Photo: Cosmos bipinnatus "Sonata White" by Julie Anne Workman, Forde Abbey, Somerset, UK
courtesy
wikipedia Par Julie Anne Workman (Travail personnel) [CC-BY-SA-3.0
(www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Cosmos sulphureus 'Bright Lights' author unknow via internet. Fair use
![courtesy wikipedia Par Julie Anne Workman (Travail personnel) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fichier:Cosmos_bipinnatus_%22Sonata_White%22.jpg){kind=link}