From the Notebooks of Anne Verveine III

I kissed a flame, what did I expect.

Those days, you painted in fire. Tangerine, gold:

one would have had to be a pilgrim to walk

through that wall of molten glass.

And purification

could be conceived, if not

attained, only after many years,

in autumn, in a fire greater than yours,

though menstrual blood still tinged the threshold

and our ex-votos were sordid—scraps of blistered flesh

taped to kitsch prayer cards—and neither of us knew

the object of this exercise, except

having, inadvertently, each of us, burned

we recognized the smell

of wood smoke, the slow swirl

flakes of wood ash make in heavy air;

and we were ready, each in a private way, to make

the gifts the season required.

Mine was the scene

of my young self in your arms,

eyes in your eyes, clutched in the effort

to give each other away—when I glimpsed

behind your pleasure, fear; behind

fear, anger; and knew

in a bolt some gifts

conceal a greater gift.

I have kept it. Now I am ready to give it back

into darker flame

in this season of goldenrod, the ardent weed,

and Queen Anne’s lace in its mantilla of ash.

And yet, how lumpishly, how stupidly I stand.

How much that is human will never burn.