Flung
9/30 I should at least acknowledge September’s ending days in this soft, soothing rain I waken to from my Saturday afternoon nap. These moments we are kings of the world or at least our lives. How broad that expanse: Friday afternoon to the wee hours of Monday.
I’m delving into my taxes, and certainly count among those whom they invented the extension for. Why would they do such a thing? The fools! There is only everything I’d rather do than this. I will not speak of my onerous record-keeping save to say I do it after a fashion, repeatable year to year, buried in receipts, ledgering life.
This lovely afternoon the outside air is practically a recording device of effect—in ongoing, unlading of water from the sky—its touch and release into miraculous, numinous vicinities. Neil de Grasse Tyson spoke recently from his knowledge of how the stars generate ingredients of existence in celestial furnaces of the cosmos with a kind of violent ongoing breathing—inhalation and explosion— of the elements:
As Kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame, As tumbled over rim in roundy wells, stones ring Each tucked string tells, each humg bell’s bow strung Finds tongue, to fling out broad its name .
He says the miracle isn’t that we’re in the universe, which of course We are, but that it is in us, Crying: what I do is me; for that I came.
Perforce
8/18 Burning the pile is a momentous thing, two stories high (many a story amassed) and the machine wades right in lifting bottom to top, turning time upside down (as one might toss brush in his yard with a pitchfork.) Its Substance, hiding under years of vegetation and vines, is freshly glimpsed—more dense than one would suppose. There’s no place for fire to breathe and live, eat its way through. All attempts fail the flame’s usual prodigy.
Splas; Splish; Splash;—my son tosses in throws of diesel upon the pile from the thin-throated fuel can, summoning a momentary inferno, but the air is damp, thick in morning bright from a yesterday afternoon downpour and logs and rotten limbs beneath the ephemera confuse in what the blaze asks them to do: Sometimes you can’t get them started, sometimes you can’t get them to stop….
There’s a moment’s halt as John Bradley climbs down from his machine, says: A little raccoon just came out of the pile and ran beneath the loader and I couldn’t see where he went. He might have climbed up into the engine or gears. My son thinks he saw it run under the machine and out into the field. No further sign of him so we assume good things and I sever away thoughts of the frog I found crushed in my car door a week ago.
We chat in the lee of the idling machinery, fire aphasic, wheezing softly to itsself—plagued with infection of drenched leaves. John says an old pile is where you’ll find a Civet cat—have you ever seen one? We answer, No, but we’ve smelt a few…” He continues, They’ll be under piles like that; only come out if you pick it all up and uncover them—then they come out— I see ‘em all the time.
Soon he’s up and off again, uprooting and fetching little trees and we give the pile more fuel, thrusting cabbage fronds aflame into the glistening tangles. Full conflagration has not yet taken. Each dousing fires momentary ascent—a burn fastens, climbs like hope up broken palettes, rotted posts and timbers only to fail and fall again. Yellow jackets chase John all the way back to us—him swatting the air, carrying in the loader teeth palm logs torn from a hummock—
where they came boiling out of a hole in the ground. A little longer and one can see this fire—like a child at certain age—will begin to take care of itself. What moment to also have forty-two weanling heifers shut in the pens, [aways brings a weather]. On the third day, we drive the mammies waiting outside the chained gate—day or night, shade or shine—back to pasture on hard-trodden paths where they came and went. They waddle along, at last silent, milk dripping
every step. Calves—up to their knees in mud—come to the smell of feed, yet at a quick movement or sound—tossed bag or ripping string—they fly from us like birds. Quietening comes slowly. The fourth morning we haul them to pasture, fifteen at a time in goose-neck loads. They land, take off in little bands, wire to wire testing bounds, to disappear for days into shadows of the hedge—yet troughs are empty next morning when we bring them feed.
All this set in motion is the same:: what we take out, tear away, amass into a pyre, or—training new-gathered lives to eat and change—as we teach a pile to swallow fire.
Sean Sexton was born and raised on his family’s Treasure Hammock Ranch and divides his time between writing, painting, and managing a 700-acre cow-calf and seed stock operation. He is author of Blood Writing: Poems (Anhinga Press); May Darkness Restore: Poems (Press 53); and two chapbooks. His third full poetry collection is Portals: Poems (Press 53). He has performed at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada, the Lone Star Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Alpine, Texas, the Miami Book Fair International, and the High Road Festival of Poetry and Short Fiction in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was nominated for a 2020 and 2021 Pushcart Prize and received a Florida Individual Artist’s Fellowship in 2001. Sean is a board member of the Laura Riding Jackson Foundation and founding event chair of the Annual Poetry and Barbeque now in its eleventh year. He also co-founded and curates a Poetry and Organ Advent and Lenten Concert Series at Community Church in Vero Beach, Florida, featuring nine concerts each year attracting poets from all over the United States. He became inaugural Poet Laureate of Indian River County in 2016.