for Bill Wood VA poet, teacher, friend
cozy cabin high on oil drum hill, acrid vapors filling lungs, wrapping around your spine. The last of the kindling scattered on the floor brought in from the chopping stump. You said
"I want to write a book called Sparks Fly Out."
In that moment the ones I saw were bright orange, crying and snapping, flying up from a log shift, the sky still too light for the first star to appear.
We were kids the last time we spoke, I didn't understand the sacrifice you would make to write your white-knuckled truth, words of a man holding his ax too tight.
Your life burned up the mountains. I feel wasted, less than a spark, less than a snap, not even warmed over kindling.
Three months before death you shared an afternoon of wishes and sparks flew. I was determined not to steal your fire, reveal the poet I too was trying to become, full of electron fantasies.
Holding your rough cardboard box of typed pages you talked about blue apples and my high school painting, still-life with blue apple. Blue Ridge apples were waiting to fall, waiting for me to drive up your smudge pot mountain road, storage dump, poisoned hill of poetry and regret, things to savor until some other lifetime. Still time.
One more spark flying out would have killed me, set off the whole mountain side, saving us all the endless burial, last minute cries and cares, worries steaming with fire sweat, screaming when it comes time to let it all out, sparks and useless major concerns, poisonous vapors, afternoons at the chopping block, still no star; But, you are and always will be the unfinished beating of brush in the Carolinas, combing the beaches, selling another timeshare for one more weekend share of brooding in your wine deep moods, praising a smoke flavored kitchen for the love and butter brush of a loving woman who baked songs in bread.
Kneeling before lichens and golden leaves outside your cottage purple with breakfast smoke, you gave singular praise for the tiniest moment of all, when we see the spark of ourselves in the wild, hoping for it to catch, to kindle a tired heart, to fire up every logger and log cabin lady who ever needed to sing.
I wasn't there for the end, shocked to learn it was all over, full of creepy questions still, will the book be finished, beloved title used. Can I buy it soon, read selfishly about me and guys down the block we grew up with? Visit Peewee's dismal gas station for a laugh.
Do I get to relive scant moments we thought would stretch down endless trails with close calls and drunk fun, camping out, once in a lifetime? Seated before an Eagle Scout campfire just at the moment when everything you were about to do came roaring out of pitch black, the air sparked like a thousand launched candles into the night... I held my heart a half second swearing that your soul touched my mind like a star and lit havoc all the rest of my imagined life with words to burn, enough havoc to burn up.
ŠJimmy Warner Design, 2010
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