I
Once, there was a boy who burnt his foot.
The story began in the Tsitsikamma
on a farm in a forest where everything was asleep.
The bed heard first and the covers parted,
the curtains blinked (too old for all this rushing around),
and the farmers looked out
to see flames waving from the valley below
where, in the light of night,
trees swayed, arms akimbo,
like in some fiery disco.
A network of paths, torch-lit, came alive
as the nearby farmers arrived
armed with slopping buckets.
Vines snapped, bark peeled,
the smell of cedar was strong
and smoke ran from the trees
like a frightened dog.
The night let out a gruff and smoky cough.
Then the farmers wrung dry their hands.
They damped their rags and broomsticks
and began to beat it.
II
This is the crippled forest
But a fire will feed on anything.
It licked out, singeing twigs and birds
which stirred too late. The boy stood up.
He put on his gumboots. He put on his dressing gown.
Dark grasses tracked him –
their footprints led from the edge of the house
to the edge of the wood,
which was another place,
without men or mothers,
and the crispy trees were a warning
he didn’t understand.
The boy looked at the fire.
It was bigger than him
and he didn’t know it yet,
but it was so frightening
that he grew older just from looking at it.
And the fire, equally inquisitive,
lifted its own lantern
exposing the days and years ahead,
folded neatly beneath his skin.
Moths spat and crackled.
And then the boy’s flat-cap lifted.
It was all that held him together,
and now it blew quickly away,
like matchsticks lit.
He was just a boy, running.
One eye melted.
One eye dripped
in the wind.
His spirit welled from the trees
in a clear, clean sap
which ran to dark stains on the soil.
He was just a boy, running
with a fire in his boot,
and he was lifting his legs like a deer.
III
Two fires, running
neither pursuing, neither pursued,
they passed through the grasses,
the leaf litter and queued-up trees
as the moon passed through
the smoky-clouds overhead
like love, which moves on,
as a finger passes through a candle,
unscathed.
A path cleared before him:
trees falling, branches surrendering
with cracks and peeps and pops.
He was burning
but he did not grow smaller like
a cigarette.
He was breathing,
but it hurt to breathe,
but he was made to breathe –
He was like the fire in that way,
the desire to throw open his mouth
and gulp back the sky,
the way birds float,
when they fly.
Fire plus fire.
This is how a fire is fought:
a damp finger circling a wine glass
to make it sing.
IV
The forest shattered.
What a glorious explosion.
Grey plumes fluttered up.
Birds and embers twinkling
in the sky! Air was all around.
The night was cheap and ashen.
And as the farmers began to leave,
the thin-necked trees rose,
open-mouthed to a dry, grey rain
that would fall for days.
Spiders sang like gondolas
through the blackened channel of trees
and something green,
something you couldn’t really see
through the rheumy residue of smoke,
lifted itself, gingerly, and left.
Nothing sinister, I suspect.
Just a sunrise which arrived,
and in a passing gesture of kindness
tossed its spare change
– crisp, cold coppers, golds, oranges, reds –
into the black and barren clearing.