Either Way Fully Engaged

Bee in the Attic
at the Old Manse, Concord, MA
Artist: Eddie Simmons

Either Way Fully Engaged

The end of this is not in sight.

And I have come to the waning of the year

weary, the way long.

                                                Wendell Berry

                                                from “Work Song”

By August the house was gone

and for good this time.  Empty conch of itself

the great shell had been drilled, the muscle
sucked, then hollowed by a tiny, more insipid one,

who moved on.  What fell from the walls,

(what hadn’t flash-burned to the paneling

like a Nagasaki kimono)

settled in flakes in the yet wet ashy footprints

of the volunteer firemen who later collapsed each

wall by wall ax blow by ax blow to know

how fire could've stalked through like a larcenist,

shouldered and slid dropped along by the blown in

insulation (that was years ago they put

that in) the tufts of crumbling horse-hair plaster, (even

more years than that, a century maybe)

and how it languished in the ceiling or the bed-

room floor depending on where you were

standing and made for the ancient (today anyway)

knob and tubing wiring cut off

after the last fire.  Years the rats

scrambled past those intestinal wires, snakes

that buzzed while they chewed down to the copper

of it all and a small zigzag spark

to singe their whiskers to squeak them to spook

them along, and one maybe on fire

after he’d earlier dipped his face too close to the open

pan of kerosene in the basement

and scattered and took his soon to be Prometheus

face through it all.  How is his

labor any different than our own bumbling own?

Don’t we all take something down

from the inside out and claim it’s our

message that will save lives that will light

up the world?  Face soaked rat?  God

chained to the foundation?  Walls that break

day and blooming sun and bring the feasting

eagle and scorch and a sea beneath

us that burns, a privilege atop the capstone of our skull

and bone don’t we know only this: that going

home to a house burned down is like returning

to the orphanage or the hospital after

the adoption or after death’s last discharge.  There’s

nothing left of us there, no matter how much

we sift and plumb through, no matter what

we carry out in a box or plastic bag labeled

with his or her name, tangled chains and

a wedding ring cut away from all that

swelling all that choking smoke too late

for the perfect rescue the proverbial

coughing on the steps the oxygen the simple

gift of drawing breath, of what comes in and goes out

methodically taking us down, feeding us, extinguishing

us, fully engaged either way.