Salamander says, in long and sibilant stresses, “ssshe seemsshy t’night, eyes tuck’t aback those tresses.” held aloft, he‘s speaking soft, speaking to the one who binds his time (the fleshly one, that blend of five set so aligned to be inclined to come alight when most alive); speaking by his sparking, so rising-red reflects his rhythm, meeting-heat his rhyme.
if he‘s heard, it’s in the skin; light and heat are the whole of his message, and when words come from fire’s kin the pronouncement itself can’t but presage the direction and duration of its instinctive, inevitable interp[ret|enetr]ation. it’s a short step from surface to center of body, and a shorter from body to mind. waves work their way through and become something new, and so it is we find mere heat becoming warmth—and light, illumination.
fire in the body
fire in the head
fire’s fingers, yellow-orange
fire’s tongues in gold and red
a body blessed with the blazing breath can’t long sit still and silent; what’s incalesced must be expressed, and its mean[ing]s must be virile, if not [con]verging into violent. so this one who’s holding him high—the one, that is, who carries the torch—is overcome with a drumbeaten martialike movement. he scratches at the skies, he tries to scorch away the shadows with this fire made a phantom-fight, a danger-dance of loosed and loosened light, a lucid s[le]ight of hands outmarking sparking arcs, ringed and ridged in dark-defying art.
the drum that drives him on is but the beating of his heart, more plain to see true the more he seethes through the luminous lines of the symbols and signs his brand is burning in the air to pair the yearning in his mind. (she stands aside, and wears a stare of sympathetic kind.) faster beats breed higher heat until the fever feeds itself into a fervor nearing frenzy as the needlepointed flame becomes a thread, becomes a cloth, and he’s wound into its wraps, tighter and tighter the brighter it braids until his breath breaks into caloricollapse.
fire burn me up
fire burn you down
fire fold me in your mantle
fire crackle at my crown
tonight she seems shy, said that sly Salamander, and knew well where that wording would lead. he wasn’t merely playing the Pander; his elemental substance takes its nature from a knowledge of need. heat must beat, light must shine, in darkness eyes are flowers, following flame like sun; for those he brings together he does more than make a match—he strikes two into one. witness: shy is how he named her, and it could have been the first that word was ever spoken, for in each first is a last, in each present a past, in each new whole an old part[ing]’s broken—opposites do more than attract, they inform. no wonder, then, that her coolness, once named, gave rise to those wordless writhings through warm into hot; from shiver to shudder, to shaken, to shot.
Salamander seems to stutter as his charred chariot, earthdropped, sputters in the night. he‘s almost faded out when, without human word, the woman lifts him up and touches her twin torches to his light. her blooms are small and quiet, as much unlike the riot of the man’s as any wielded flame could be and yet still burn, and as she moves with them now her kinetics echo how the planets wheel, the stars re[v]e[a]l, the seasons turn. she glides and slides through stretched-out strides, slow and smooth and seamless; her [st]rings are rhythmic as the tides, drawing in deep as a dreamless sleep the one who burnt himself to embers. two Salamanders whisper: “ssso fluid. we remember . . . “
fire in the blood
fire in the heart
fire fed on feeling’s flood
fire, first and fondest art
“we knew you when you feared us, found us, learned to build your lives around us. we watched you struggle to master our [st]art, to carry us from parching plains to snowy groves. you held us in the heart of every home, coiled in the coals of every cauldron, every stove. we know you now, when you seldom seek our light, when you’ve replaced our fire’s flicker with the cool and constant, colorless glare of unglowing, unknowing brights to fill your shortened, sleepless nights. now you only call us on occasion, keep us small and bound, spray us silent when we spread. yourselves are the victims of this [e]vac[u]ation; you’ve near emptied your world of slow and living lumines, turned to electric quickness in stead.
“moving,” (the Salamanders’ way to say ‘still’, to mean ‘yet’), “every kindling is a proving, and your bodies don’t forget.” the proof of this is plain as sight: the man’s eyes trace the curves the woman draws against the night. his heart has slowed to match her pace of shades—slowed but strengthened, lengthened with the longing that pulls him to a stand. he moves to her, moves with her, carrying his smoldering heartwood in his hands, and lays it at her feet. she slides to a stop, drifts to a drop, sets her torches touching his where it once burned; it comes again alight; their twined flames hie to greater height. a single Salamander smiles from the center, contented and complete.
fire in the space between,
fire in its bed—
of coals, of souls, of halves made whole—
fire: warmth and wildness, wed
Salamander‘s silent now, or nearly so; she sighs with those who sleep there by her side. this night is her time, and when it ends her work will be done; in the morning her heat will give way to the sun’s. this is the only way she knows: he comes, they glow, and then she goes–but neither far, nor long: her song, once sung, is singed into the skin of those it touches; to hear is to be seared, marked with her measure. so great is the pleasure we’ll p[l]ay any cost to bask in the warm one’s word: that heat, once held, is never lost, only transformed, traded, transferred.
so Salamander smiles and abides, sure she will return to rise from where she now resides and rests: curled in the world that beats with_in those pressed-together chests, her dear and darling charlings’ a[r]doreddened nests.
fire’s rhyme is golden
fire’s rhythm, red
heed my art’s heat, i’ll feed your heart’s beat—
this is what the fire said