watched the roaring fire like Jonathan Edwards
once described flailing fear for the school children,
or maybe it's a sermon of John Owen, which instilled in my soul
a despair, eyes-of-a-bird hollow.
And so I thought of calmer fires:
winter fires, camp fires,
or even the high fires of Wuthering Heights
which also roared,
but with a wild dance.
These were not the Puritan abominations that sent
screaming angels to heaven;
and I thought how different the same
transition from lightning to death,
entropy turning life to black,
warmth to new soil,
and was that difference simply an overflow?
I would say I want to open my mouth,
take in light by the starful
until I'm burned into a new being...and yet
I stretch these thoughts back around
to once again walk the forest paths,
chilled night paths, with my love
as she flowed like water through the crackle
of leaves under an old moon.
I held her hand when life was possible,
and that memory calms these modern anxieties,
takes me briefly back to The Grange, where I remind myself
I'm not and never have been Edgar,
but nor am I Heathcliff
...or Lockwood.
How might the plot have been different
had instead of Edgar Linton there was
Edgar Allan?
“Catherine! Catherine! At my chamber door!
I walled up memories in the wine cellar;
Help me forget my love, this inner war,
And forevermore not speak of lost Lenore.”
And so I am...a ghost without a raven;
I walk the moors, always in between
the settings of this fairy tale
long after the author's spirits went
to rest quietly in the earth.
