Day Twelve
When the fire came it burned a hole in the porch,
like a portal being opened to the far below.
Sissy used to tell me that if you dropped something in it
you could hear it fall all the way through to the end of the earth.
So one day I took my collection of eucalyptus buttons
and threw them in the blackened pit below;
the jigsaw teeth of the burned out boards
like ivory appendages ripped from bodies of great beasts.
I didn’t hear the sound of falling like Sissy said I would,
So I just stood there with my empty jar,
bereft of years of good keeping
my collection was swallowed up by that black earth
leaving me with the wasted anticipation and the heavy
empty jar. It seemed so much lighter when it was full
even though it weighed down my arms.
So I walked away from the yawning abyss that swallowed
my eucalyptus buttons whole, with a heavy heart of disappointment.
When we moved away a short time later
I left the jar with its emptiness
beside the pit the inferno had left behind;
standing upright on its own, the jar was
the only thing left in our gutted out home.
But when I grew up and years had whittled my cheeks with age
twenty maybe even thirty years later
I went back to the place where the fire started late that night,
hoping to look that darkness right in the eye
and ask the questions that haunted me for so many years.
But when I pushed my way through the gutted cobwebbed remains
of a place I once called home and made my way to the back porch
the darkness was gone, replaced by the outstretched trunks of eucalyptus trees.
The trees rose up in the middle of our porch
the new trunks breaking through the old planks of wood
pushing upward and upward as if to show that they could.
I walked across the deck with slow awestruck steps
my eyes turned upward in reverence of the great canopy.
Drawn back to the earth from the skyward reach I heard the crunch below my feet.
Lifting my foot I held below, the ground was littered with buttons
like a fresh blanket of winter snow.
I knelt by the edges of what once was an abyss and touched the base of new life
that grew in the face of darkness and refused the decree: do not be.
To my amazement, as I knelt there, I found it beside me
Unchanged except on thing, this time when I picked up the old glass jar
it was far from empty.
Filled to the brim with fallen eucalyptus buttons
the trees had replaced the source that had unknowingly given them life.