Arranging the Blaze

He spoke from the back room of a storm
where sky fires revolved around a ship's mast.

The Golden Fleece was a thing made of words,
the wool a man grows
to warm himself in the blue snow of desert mesa.

Nations disappeared

in search of this,
crows belled from the eaves
rang only
for the guilty. Even their shadows

left fingerprints along our vertebrae.

Corner stores staggered to Route 66
to thumb a ride
from the ghosts of coyotes in gravel trucks.

Citizens pinched money between their eyelids.
In the drying hands of butchers
the bone saw rattled with bridges.

A shepherd sang from far away,
a lizard born of solar wind
crept inside the well of a cactus to sleep.

Beggars founded their own city
in the long median that burns with oleander
from Miami to LA.

The beer tasted of uranium. Flint Wing
auctioned the Milky Way's pelt
for a dawn-streaked pontiac

with a full tank of gas.

I watch the welders make the carousel
angular on one knee, atop a ladder,
amidst flame and their own private cloud

of dust or smoke
or something else, like memory --
adjoining beams at right angles,

the joists, the wheels,
one tongue of fire
like a word.

Under the masks
they are magicians
seaming sky

to mountain
with a red stitch,
a green stitch.

I've seen their work before,
wherever theory
or bone

needed binding
that would otherwise lie back
in its own vein of ore,

iron
among malachite,
Irish among their dead,

scars beneath the breasts
where the coal train crosses.
Civilization

depends on this,
this math
at the wrist, at the mouth.

The welders are laughing now
above their heavy
boots, holding the cold beer

against the vein in their necks.
The carousel is turning.
It's night! The dragons!