ONE-TENTH ASH

When the steam engine became the water wheel,
men changed the name of coal back again
from steam to sea. The trains
no longer ran, in concert or in competition.
The fire in the pit no longer burned, and lightning
went back into the clouds, and the clouds to the sea.
Soil recovered beds so thick
and close to the surface that strip mining had seemed easy.
It was the same with the seams:
fire stopped threading underground.
What was once assumed a volcano
on the large island was still thought of that way,
the coal undiscovered. Just as the prairie
caught fire, so did coal exposed in air in drifts of stone,
but men retraced their steps back to the east and left the fires                    
without their names and dates
in books bound with cloth or leather.
Children were not given a lump of coal to say
they had been bad, nor for luck for warmth to come.
Their fathers' lungs cleared to roses.
Sulfur didn't fall in the rain
in lakes and cities but returned to the point of ignition.
Kerosene returned to paraffin
and that to candle coal. People wore pendants
they carved from coal until that too returned
to the earth, and the pressure lifted with each century.
The coal regressed from black
towards the brown of the soil that it had been
and then rose up from the ground once again, living
with the sun of the garden where scale trees
held bright flames.

__

CENTURY MIX

Her hands midair, she takes the rooster's neck
and yanks it so that it becomes a flower.
How, no one questions.

Inside their house, a room of bags
holds spiders, widows that bite
and why not in anger.

No one seems surprised, not even the children,
that death has many eyes. Their yard is dirt
like in the old times,

and she is on the ground, kneeling, sweeping
with her fingers so that it patterns
with soft stoneless rows

as if seeds could be planted, hens' teeth
suddenly good for something. But without rain,
the dust is too fine

for anything, even to keep the form she is creating.
Please, say the children, kill the spiders. It's impossible
to find them all

in the plaid across their father's back, on the floor
where the children throw their clothes like skin
that she must wash and sort

every other day with water that comes from somewhere
for a pretty penny. The widows are running
from the window,

and she keeps her shoes on so she can kill them
as needed, all legs with an empty center
of sand wound in poison

ready and moving. The roosters-become-flowers
watch from the pots along the foundation.
It's her job now.

__

Both poems originate in questions.

"One-Tenth Ash": Popular political discourse appeals to the desire to return to how things were before. What if we follow coal's return to such a conclusion?

"Century Mix": A man posed a question: if we learn to pay attention to our dreams, what can we discover that helps us move forward? I had dreamed of celosia.