How to Burn

Dawn leaks above-normal temperatures, erasing outlines of Michigan winter. Evergreen bushes spring back to their usual shape and the Grand River overruns its banks.

Songs of the nuthatch coil the length of pines, and a woodpecker works with intense diligence on the oak. It's no where near spring, so we all know the toothy wind and mushroom sky will be back. Winter will return like a hard slap across the face after a week or two of garden-dreaming and short-sleeved sun bathing on the back porch.

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Once, I was slapped so hard by my mother that the braces on my back teeth came loose and shredded the inside of my cheek. Mom didn't normally dole out corporal punishments so the hit was equal parts painful as surprising.

I set a hill on fire, put many people in danger, and embarrassed the family.

This shame wasn’t my first shame; shame was soil in which I grew.

What options do growing things have but to either live or die where they are planted?

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In the greater woods, he and I unpacked and repacked marriage. As we talked and gazed outward from the massive windows, our eyes tracked the deep shape and shadows of birch, hemlock, and white pine.

The perilous animals are tucked away, sleeping unto a better time, but deer tip-toed around the cabin, whispering of mysteries we could not quite hear. This man loves me and is willing to churn up the soil in order to keep growing.

At this late stage I begin to claim myself and somehow, he rises to meet me. Why didn't the ancestors teach me this — how to burn? Now I make up for an invisible past by impart on my children the power and respect for fire.

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Yet the wilderness is holiness and in it, I am part of a virginal horizon.

It is here I know for whom the poetry is authored and why.

I am tended with tenderness and love now, but I still need the sun . . . and only the sun teaches me how and why to burn with holy fire.