Fire, Fire

In my previous post I mentioned a memory of watching from my bedroom window as a house down the highway burned. I don't remember how old I was then, but I walked or rode my bike by that house countless times since it was where I would turn east if I were headed to my friend Jeff's house, and to my right if I were walking north to where my barber had his shop alongside his house. The barber himself was a big, heavy man, and he would eventually have a heart attack that forced me to find a new barber while he took some time off. For many years my haircut was easy: as short a crew cut as a person could get. I must have been an easy 15 minutes' work for him. There were two good things about those haircuts: the hot lather on the back of my neck that was removed by a straight razor, and the post-haircut scalp massage. He recovered from his little heart-thing and resumed cutting hair about the time I started letting my hair grow out a bit (I must have been in 7th grade), and the day I went back to him he must not have noticed that my looks had changed, for he pretty much scalped me. "You want to cry?" my mother asked when I got home and showed her what had happened. "Yeah," I said, but since I was in 7th grade I knew I couldn't cry. "I don't blame you," she said.

But, the fire.

I watched the house burn from a mile or so away, and I recall smoke and fire trucks. Oddly enough, I also remember seeing someone walking away from the house, though I'm not sure how accurate this memory is given the distance between us. Nevertheless, I've kept that memory for decades, and many years ago came up with a poem that was based in part on that memory. It's not an especially good poem, but I'm putting it up here nonetheless.

First Fire

I was eight years old when the first fingers
of white smoke reached up from the farmhouse
roof. An old woman walked through the yard,
stopping at the highway before turning to see
a birth of yellow heat.
The house burned for two hours.
The woman never moved--just watched,
just let the commotion of people
sing around her.
I wondered why she had carried
nothing out, and I made a list
of my own treasures to save:

the Tonka truck;
Ernie Banks’ baseball card;
a model of the USS Missouri.

Thirty years later I know other reasons
for fire: success, anger, love.
The old woman must have known too,
must have seen the same things
and more
in the years it took her to walk
from that house to that highway.

So why look back?

I imagine her saying.

Everything burns.
What rises out of those ashes
will rise.

In this poem, there are only a couple elements of fact: I owned a never-completed model of the USS Missouri, and the fire itself. I was never a toy-truck person, so I never owned a Tonka truck; I would've killed for an Ernie Banks baseball card, but I never had one--though was was an fan of the Chicago Cubs, the team on which Banks played.