Apple wood
by Nicholas Messenger
[ poetry - june 07 ]
What wood burns like this, for so long buried in the ashes?
Apple wood, we said, would go on all night, white with passionate
embers. There was a block of oak we cut once, too,
out of a beam six generations curing in our kitchen ceiling,
that we burned one Christmas Day. It burnt with nearly blue
intensity from dawn till midnight when the last bright
nuggets died out in the cinders like an old sun healing
over. Coals that flare and glimmer, blaze and gutter
dark-long in the grate might be the fire-flash petrified
in tree millennia since, but there is no natural fuel can harbour
heat the way the heart does, glowing in ambush deep
like a tiger, striped with flames, that only a fool supposes sleeps.
