Help, as usual, arrived too late. In jugs slung across
the backs of cows, the water sloshed and spit itself out,
the daughter tugging and hustling the animals
flameward up the hill. By the time she reached it,
the house lay in charring heaps, the trees
hissing like blown-out wicks. The daughter knew
she should’ve burnt too
and spent the soot-stained afternoon
watching herself in a reckoning blaze—
bound up in the curtains, her fingers fretting hot cloth,
holding a melting plastic pail
twisted like a wrung bird’s neck,
chaining herself up in the dim attic.
And oh the savage heat of it all—
But let her rest now. Let her lie down in the ash
and shut her eyes. Let her always wish the house
back to burning—when the portraits still held
a familiar flaming hand or eye, when smoke rose
into the air like new blooms, when a door,
smoldering but whole, was still there to be opened.