After dark, in the southwest corner
of our back yard, behind
the limestone wall he built along a dirt
alley—just twenty-seven rods
from the house where he was born—
my father burns our trash.
As the fire takes hold, he grabs
his lead-pipe poker, stirs to flame
a defiant clump of Wichita Eagles,
a stubborn stack of Lifes and Times,
his body coiled, a theft of breath
as he smashes blackened bottles
and pounds burnt tins into the soot
and char we’ll later haul to the dump.
He pauses, eyes his work.
From a secret stash in his wall, he fishes
a can of my mother’s hairspray,
shakes it to hear it slosh. He smiles, stirs
the fire again, drops in the can, leads me
by the hand a hundred feet down the alley,
turns now to measure his magic:
the red flash, the bloom and billow
of his great whoosh-flower,
the rapture in my nine-year-old gaze,
the blaze that tongues the night,
the smoke that willows in the wind,
the sparks that flit like meteors
toward our neighbor’s barn, then spend
themselves into oblivion—
little ash-birds
flown to the abyss of prairie,
omens I’m too young to read.
