They can’t
imagine
here what
it is like to watch
a river
burn, the fire
spring to
life as you
flicked
the butt of your fag
into the
Cuyahoga.
Lucky it
didn’t light
the
embankment where we stood
or the
coal flats where we wrestled
in the
back seat of your car,
we would
joke later about that
Chariot of
Fire. Piece of us now
burnt into
me — a Burning Man
on a
desert floor already blackened,
naked with
fear of having done
not enough
to keep you,
wanting
you to set me on fire,
but whetted with the sinews of the bent
river
crooked against the skyline
from which
we’d come. Aliens
to an
alien world. No one
here can
imagine what it is
to have
lived through the moment,
the fire
in us burnt out.
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