To Build A Fire

Feb 20 2015

Building a fire
you must be meticulous.
Punk, kindling, twigs,
small logs, cut and split,
and only then
the big stuff.
You must feed the fire judiciously,
or risk
suffocation.

Down to your final match
in freezing hands
it takes gargantuan patience,
on your knees, blowing hard
to the dizzy black
of fainting.

But in a conflagration
oxygen, the stuff of life
is poison gas;
the virtuous circle
of heat-combustion-heat
turns to vice
uncontained.

What you create, it destroys,
building a fire
only to find
nothing's been built at all.
The heat
in its chemical bonds,
the greed
that eggs us on,
the tragic end, the fatal flaw
in one's essential nature.

So go step-by-step
nursing the flame.
Or go big, and inundate
with gas, kerosene, rocket fuel,

watch as it

insatiably consumes.

The stack of wood.

Your last stick

of furniture.

The bonfire

holds us hypnotized,

hair singed, faces flushed.
Feed the fire, feed the fire
it urges us,
so we build and build
and burn us up.


The poem begins by channelling Jack London and his famous short story. But then it becomes a parable of environmentalism, warning that there can be no such thing as endless growth; that all we have built contains the seeds of its own destruction. And the exothermic reaction of wood burning in a fire -- heat-combustion-heat -- becomes a perfect analogy to the positive feedback effects that accelerate climate change: things like deforestation, like loss of albido from ice melt. Virtuous cycles become vicious ones.

Writing poems like this is a kind of relief, a form of ventilation. But having written, I'm ambivalent. Because this is exactly what I said, back when I began this blog, that I didn't like: political stuff, advocacy, agit-prop. I prefer lyric poems: small, personal, observational; not polemics and diatribes. The trick is to avoid stridency, while keeping it fresh and surprising and whimsical, giving it some kind of narrative force, and salting it with small verbal and sensory rewards; so even the indifferent and somewhat apathetic reader finds the poem worthwhile. I hope I've managed a bit of that here.

I mean those little surprises I hope will sneak up on the reader. Things like abruptly turning oxygen into a poison gas (which it is, if you're an anaerobe; and which it was, back when all life on earth was anaerobic and this toxic gas first began to appear -- thanks, photosynthesis!) And things like your last stick/ of furniture: the compulsion to feed the fire so powerful, you'll grab anything and throw it in; future be damned.

I actually began this as a playful exercise in language: the expression "build a fire". The use of "build", with its connotation of permanence and substance, struck me as odd in this context: all that meticulous effort, immediately up in flames; nothing ..."built" at all. And then, if he isn't careful, the builder, destroyed by his own creation. And like the tragic hero of literature, the fatal flaw in its very nature.

But, of course, could the relentlessness of a fire, its consumptive growth, and the heat and carbon that are the products of combustion have led me anywhere else but climate change? So I suppose that here, too, the fatal flaw was there from the start!

I really like the way the last line seems a little off. I find I intuitively want to read this as burnS: the bonfire (singular) seems the natural subject of that verb. But, of course, the subject is the we from build and build: the sentence is actually we .../ ...burn us up. Burn ourselves. Exactly.

And who says I stink at dialogue? Feed the fire, feed the fire: positively Shakespearean!