The Hearth Within The Mortar

Between the sounds the sounds are nameless.
Just the same, do something seemingly lasting.
All you need is a few to set you above their names.

A name as a kind of falling toward. Is a name
a life of servitude? Get out, leave everything.
It has flammable rivers going up beneath it.

When the fires in the rivers began the rivers
asked to flow between the sounds between
the sounds, back to where their names lived.

When the flaming waters ran through town
children ran along and thought it good fun
but the floodbreaks burned the children down.

There came an old man who told them how
to show the heat and steam who is in control.
He stayed until someone pushed him in.

This was their way of giving. Write uses
for change on change and throw it down
a melted metal storm drain.

Since this seemed important everyone took
great care not to read it. There were words
there that resembled the sounds of rain.

The faith in whatever the land changed
changed if the sound began sounding
scary, saying no, you must remain whole.

Make someone new who will go far enough
to do what we tell her would help the forest.
Parts of that story are patently true.

Tell him his small time here means less
the more is said about doing his homework
in soot along the banks of the smoke bed.

Say this page saw people, saying what
it means years after their homes had burned.
When do you think the page would fall to ash?

The last of the food is going fast. When the food
goes the land begins to renew itself. Partly
because we leveled that incline, partly

because, again, we refused to embrace
the dance of the passing of trees. The rain
that we thought would quell the burning

rivers was a rain of flames. Less than one
year of selling love in the ruins of the under-
growth and the whole venture lost momentum.

That one year should have produced a child
to replace the old one. That part that we used to say
in school to a picture of a tree ablaze? The will

said because times have been hard, I will make times
even harder, still. I will leave you all high and dry
in the night with the tinderbox near the banks.

The banks of one of those inlets. The one you
won’t discover in time. Her old sounds and the sounds
of her weeping silently into a microphone.

Any day it will come again. It will relieve us all
of our duties. It will also be very pretty. Parts of it
will be these parts of the night I have in my hand.

Then will I show you the features of the face
of the name you cannot write in ash on stone.
Then will you know that no one spoke here now.