Overrun by imminent majesty

Last Year

We fled from fire as it descended from hungry
chaparral, summer already curing the oaken sky
as a skeletal stingsect took its place low in the
bones of the southern ecliptic, a crimson star
pulsing flamewise hardened by antarean armor,
its two releasers poised to flood the night with
sustain and persistence as we had not yet met.

We would come eleven months later when love
might well have forgotten us in its mad tumble of
beck and call as it saw to incite the blind prayers
offered by so many others. But the keen fire came,
devoured some, spared some, left us in a wake of
black smoke and incindered charms. Our house stood,
fierce against whatever the sky might counter with.



And the flames knew each of our names, crossed
them off without checking, those of us who were
not to be taken into its strictest confidences, those
of us who were to give everything to them without
complaint, without promise of purpose or safe passage.
It was the cruelest commencement of a season in recent
memory, one that would last well past then and now.

So we met—a poet and a quilter—pressed into stanzas
of seven lines each amid an economy that may or may
not work out either in literal or literary life. These are
things we send upcirrus in drafts of transmutated ash,
toward next year where we might stand to look back at
now and here we are, this way, fleeing from fire again
because to do so is to be overrun by imminent majesty.

Joseph Gallo
July 5, 2009