Our Language Comes From Fire
our language comes from fire
a star is fire
my heart is fire
like the time I
jumped a train
in the rain
beyond the Albany
station headed for LA
with a stranger
I’d just met
in the shadows
off the platform
we got high
by the siding
he was a hobo
coming from nowhere
nowhere to go
and so going
everywhere
way back when
we all come from stone people
water is life and
I’m a partisan of air
with lineage of
bronze age herders
on the grassy plains of
northern Black Sea shores
but our language comes from fire
and everything goes
in circles
sun moon and earth
seasons days and history
and after food and shelter
our story begins in a
circle around the fire
where the prime languages
don’t have a word for religion
because religion is everything
don’t have a word for art
because everything is art
some people live
entire lives
and never even
think of such things
let alone realize them
lost in civilization’s
bad coding
and an invisible
tangle of words
with no currency
no fire inside
we got as far as
the colossus of Chicago
where I transferred at Union Station
midst sordid grifters and shady hustlers
rank conmen and ravening wolves
throngs of all manner American
onto the Southwest Chief
and just a few hours later
crowded in the lounge car
sat stalled for three hours
outside Naperville
through a power outage in
hundred three degree humidity heat
but the well groomed steward
took brotherly pity
and slid me
cool beers for free
until the ice melted by
I remember so many faces and
souls from the ride
all across the continent
two brothers from Louisville
set out to a family reunion
the older Julius and I
became friends
all the way down the line
one night long after the journey
at two thirty in the morning
I thought how I hadn’t heard
from him in a year
and he called that very moment
from a phonebooth
in Kentucky
loitered on a streetcorner
waiting on a girl
then came Ricky
a runaway from New Orleans
with flawless drawl and
wastrel cheshire smile
he blamed his father for it all
as rootless young men will do
and of course the arty ones too
he bragged how he’d purloined
some summary sum from the old man
before he fled unto the tracks
with a rucksack and month pass
headed for anywhere
we too became fast friends
especially late one night when
over the heavy last car rumble
he shouted down a big
mean old lady chainsmoker
with two cigarette packs
in her shirt pocket and
one rolled up each sleeve
after she threatened to call
the conductor on us
there was an elderly woman from Kansas
and for some reason I have
never forgotten
early one morning
the plains honed tone and
earnest innocent
kind grain of her reply that’s a good idea
to a friend’s breakfast suggestion
the language of the midwest
is not the language of
other places
I recall
Miss Shelley Callaway
from down around
El Paso
an American girl
of picture show dreams
long and lean
wholesome smile
we talked for
five hundred miles
exchanged information
before she loped off
onto the platform
and I watched her
bound down the tracks
lithesome and gone
this was the
good old days
we didn’t know we had
and we lost touch
down these now
shallow
digitized decades
but she has never left my
mind and I
still feel acute connection
and affection for her
always
there was the wizened dark man
with gnarled hands
in worn denim shirt
and torn cowboy hat
who answered
cotton
when I asked what was that
grown low and scattered
down about the
scorchered hot
shadeless ground
and that explained
a lot
about that
there were all night
card games and wagers
boundless vistas
magical expanses of land
that only those who go by the irons
ever live to see
distant wildfire
to wonder for a lifetime
folks from
every small crossroads town
you never heard of
and once in a great while
the outstretched
complex networks
of metropolis railyard
filigreed in
comic colored graffiti
to roll the folkways
of the young and free
there were senescent
Pueblo women
who sold me silver
in sharp glint
of noonday
Rio Grande sun
the nonagenarian
Arizonan
soft spoken in black suit and
turquoise bolo
for whom I brewed coffee
and received long forgotten wisdom
amid tales of brazen
Tucson and Tombstone
if reincarnation happens
he could be
in his twenties now
the age I was then
wildcatting about the land
booming with lust and wanderlust
to hop trains
with strangers
into space and
time zones
unknown
limitless
like wild stallions
who train their line and
aim to break down
the society that
always tries to
ride them
break down
the false indoctrination of school
graying yoke of
marriage and career
cookie cuts
that dumb down and
flame out
in the numb and drown
of meds and alcohols
break down
sure formulas for
conformist existence
discovered way too late
to recover anything
let alone the untamed
undomesticated
rare feral days of
priceless youth
break down
the trick myths of money
race
deep layered acculturation
and finally break free
to light out for the territories
storm bareback
down far trails with heart
on our language of fire
into new forever
adventure stories and
lore for the tribe
❏