And Still I Rise

I don’t understand how fires consume entire forests and towns when I can’t, with newspapers, dry branches, fallen pinecones, and a lighter, get one going in my backyard firepit.

“That’s a lot of smoke.” Tim emerges from the backdoor. “But I’m guessing there’s no fire.”

“It’s impossible,” I declare, full aware I’ve thrown down a gauntlet. Tim takes over. By the time I go inside the cottage, open a bottle of Jordan chardonnay for me and lemon seltzer for Tim, climbed up to the loft and grabbed four books of poetry, my husband has the fire roaring. “That’s a honey.”

I borrow the line from Tim from long ago when we used to comb the shore of Democrat Point for beach glass. I was new to seaglass mining and often didn’t know the difference between shell and ocean tumbled glass. I’d hold up a piece. “Is this one?”

“Oh yeah, you bet.” He’d take it from me and roll it over in his hand. “That’s a honey.” And he’d cradle my hand in his and press the prized piece back into my palm. Inside our home are vintage bottles filled with beach glass. The measure of years of sandy strolls solidifying our love.

I sit and sip and get drunk on wine and poetry and my husband, who will not let the flames die out, even when I am sure they are waning to dying embers. Nope. Old flooring that he had stored in the shed and logs drying on the lip of the firepit keep it going.

I add spoken verses to the air from Maya Angelou, Lynda Hull, Todd Davis, and Mary Oliver. And somehow my mind settles on this fiery declaration:

“I will dedicate the rest of my life to poetry. I will live in service of poetry, this underappreciated dying art. I will have a YouTube channel and write Broadway plays and spontaneously erupt into verse at parties. Poetry will be my passion and my purpose.”

“Hm,” is all Tim says, but with a lilt. Over our twelve years together, he’s heard hundreds of such nighttime pronouncements that fizzled at dawn.

The exact reason why I am writing this in prose.