Imagine That Your House Is On Fire
Cheryl A. Rice
because it is,
because at birth the match is lit.
Tinder beneath us, flames smolder
slowly for years, but we adjust.
We open our jackets, turn up the a.c.,
but the house continues to burn.
What would you take with you
once leaving can no longer be avoided?
What one thing from this precious life
do you think would ease passage into the next?
It is all too heavy. None of it can be tucked in a pocket,
loaded into a U-Haul. None of it.
When fire forces us out, nothing you once considered priceless
will be worth a damn. Once fire begins to char the beams,
burn a hole in the roof that kept you sane all this time,
nothing you’re arranged around yourself—
fortress of furnishings, poems on a flash drive,
will be going with you.
There goes the lease, along with Grandma’s
sheer cotton curtains you always meant to
make something beautiful with, but never did.
Ashes of homespun memory fly up
to the stars you will soon become,
after fire has had its way,
after you, and the house,
and this life, have all ended on time.
*
Cheryl A. Rice’s poems have appeared in Home Planet News, Misfit Magazine, and Trailer Park Quarterly, among others. Recent books include Love’s Compass (Kung Fu Treachery Press), and Until the Words Came (Post Traumatic Press), coauthored with Guy Reed. Her blog is at: http://flyingmonkeyprods.blogspot.com/. Rice lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.