Mud Devotions

We could tell the fire was coming toward us, 
coming out of the night trees, but it seemed

to be moving so slowly, with such ponderous care 
that we doubted it would ever reach us.

And I dreamed that night that I felt the heat 
against my skin. And it seemed that it was writing

something or tattooing something. And I woke, 
in the morning, to look out the window.

The fire was still so very far away, still somewhere 
along the horizon. It was preying on the trees

or praying out of them. And I wondered if the fire 
might be beckoning us or warning us. I wondered

if it had been hiding all the years, always
out of reach and watching, always with those same

flickering, restless eyes. For our primitive selves 
once danced around those flames.

For it was always the apocalypse. And even the grass
of memories burned. And something was always arriving

with the smoke. I assumed it was the years. And we woke 
in the dark and even the moon was spinning free.

So we made prayers from the deep-red clouds at dawn 
bleeding out at the world’s edge. And my wife and I

sat evenings on the porch and watched the fire alive 
across the river. Everything was always blinking out.

Everything hung. The sun hung in the sky and burned. 
The moon hung in the tangles of the clouds.

And I remembered my father once skinning a deer 
in our backyard. And the deer, decades later,

trotted in our direction from the fire. And the rowboats 
of the clouds were a conflagration.

And I imagined that the hoofprints left by that deer
were a kind of numerology. And I remembered watching

my father from the kitchen window,
the smears of blood collecting atop the backyard snow.

And the crows kept dying in the fires, then coming back. 
They were lonely in death. They were lonely in life.

We saw them perched amid the trees. They were black 
obelisks. We saw them moving above us in the sky.

They were black handkerchiefs. We saw them catching fire, 
but still they were with us in the morning. And still

their single-syllabic calls fissured air. And we studied them 
from our windows, studied the fire feeding on the land

like crows feeding at the upturned bellies of roadkill. 
And even that roadkill kept coming back to life.

Read more from Issue 21.1.