Words Of Fire

I’m sitting by a fireside. The logs are logogrammatic. It’s an imaginary fireplace. But with a real fire. I swear it’s real. It’s burning the words down. The words I put on the fire. That I started with words. And couldn’t stop. So now it’s everywhere. Can you feel the heat of it? It blankets the mind in supposition. And then there’s frost. Those mornings when you want to get into the car and get the heater on but you can’t go anywhere until the frost has been removed from the windshield and the engine hasn’t been running long enough to produce any heat so you have to get out and look for the scraper and scrape that frost and ice from the windshield and it feels good to do that and get back in and start the car. This is what you do in the northwest. Adapt to frost. Adapt to rain. Adapt to ice. Adapt to damp and cold and solitary pedestrians distant and unapproachable in their introspection or conversation on a wireless phone or fairies and elves who knows. It’s the northwest. Kingdom of moss. Realm of mushrooms. Home of Grunge. Domain of the Dark. Long cold nights and omnipresence of all the oceans of the world. Everything moist and steaming and slippery and delicate as those fronds on the Jurassic ferns. And I keep wondering what exactly it is you can do with words. They seem to confuse things more than clear the obfuscating air and its 7-11s on foggy midnights near Aberdeen. The warmth of an animal speaks volumes. Concaves are conversational. Presentiments stoop to the truth. Which is a caterpillar spinning in dreams of fruit. Which is a fabrication. Internalized by an internist in Issaquah. Studying a new disease. Which happens to be on my mind today. Issaquah.  Not disease. I don’t know how it happens. How the mind’s focus drifts so unnoticeably into the ether of reverie. Maybe it’s the weather. The caprice of a gas. The whim of the wind through eelgrass. Maybe its’s the mountains. They don’t look like themselves. They look like the Wasatch in Utah. Like the Sandia Mountains in New Mexico. Even the Olympics are bare. The gods are naked. Bare as a rock. Granitic splendor of whatever intelligence in the soil makes volcanos vomit fire from subterranean realms of a molten heart. I remember the immensity of Notre Dame cathedral and how those vaults inside seemed to ascend with limitless force, and that I was standing in a mountain of stone, an edifice erected to counter the miseries visited on our kind. I heard recently that the ability to tolerate uncertainty is a mark of maturity. If that’s the case I’m still a child. I have a hard time with uncertainty. Of that I’m most certain. I’m just now learning the art of Negative Capability. Trying to accept the improbable, even before it’s probable, or solvable, or anatomical. It’s all just grass, in the end. And the wind in the trees.