Al Maginnes
What Fire Writes on Water
By now the burning river is history’s cliché, abstract enough
to be urban myth,
but it is truth as well.
There is film if you want to find it, if imagination
will not offer those flames, their body a raft
on black water, a soft mass fed by chemicals
and surface trash. But neither imagination
or the clinical documentaries of film can substitute
for witness,
the thin smoke scorching your sinuses,
your eyes watering with benzene fumes, all you see
wavering. Your lungs threaten to blossom into flame.
* * *
If we live in a world where fire might take root
on a field of water, I tell my students,
then we live
in a world where anything is possible. So write
as if you are the thing unexpectedly on fire, as though
the tablet where you scrawl your words is dissolving
and you must finish whatever is being said. Write
like you don’t know your middle name, write with
the recklessness of the imprisoned girl who, denied
pen and paper, gouged poems into bars of soap,
memorizing each fractured line as she scratched,
who
washed her hands before dawn with that soap,
her clean hands, the soap’s lingering perfume the only evidence.
* * *
To see those books written, forget everything. Become
the motel room in east Tennessee where I woke to take
a sad inventory of scuffed walls, nicotined curtains
staring at me where I lay on a mattress thinned
by the weight of 10,000 bodies before mine. Burns printed
each piece of furniture. My unfinished drink rested
on a table. A book I had not opened the night before lay beside it.
For some reason I opened the drawer that always holds
the Bible in such rooms. The good book was there
right next to a pack of rolling papers. The inside
of the drawer was graffitied with the names
of travelers, with dates and destinations. I started
to write my own name but stopped, suddenly convinced
that anything I wrote would draw one more line
through a life already too fond of nameless travel,
the erasures that wash clean given enough distance.
* * *
For a year I lived elbow to elbow with a guy who changed
his last name every few months. Finally we just called him
Steve Alias.
He claimed to be wanted in California
or Colorado, and maybe he was. He showed up in our town,
found a couch to crash on, then another one, then a room
in a house where some friends of mine lived, found jobs
and ways to cash his paychecks from those jobs—say what you would
about him, and there was plenty to say, he would work
and work hard.
Finally he burned someone foolish enough
to front him money for a lot of dope, and he vanished
across the humming surface of a highway, shrinking
into cold pulses of neon, rainbows circles of oil
rain draws from asphalt, fugitive again
as he fled the old laws of friendship and betrayal,
in love with the act of fleeing, just as fire will
always love being fire, and water remains water.
* * *
I have tried to write Steve’s story. The truth
is hard to know or tell. Easier to live
as he did, in a fiction invented by each step
forward. A year after Steve’s vanishing,
almost no one spoke his name. And no one wished
anything but pain and distance for him.
I have nearly drowned, and once I woke
to find my front porch on fire. I’ve betrayed
a few friends, but none so thoroughly
as Steve Alias did. I chopped away
the burning pieces of my porch, soaked down
the smoking wood before the fire truck arrived
and stood there believing—as Steve must have
when he got wherever he was going, pockets filled
with other people’s money—that I was salvaged
once more, a cat reclaiming its lives.
* * *
It’s hard not to get sidetracked. Maybe Steve wrote
his most recent name or the one before that on the wall
of a room transients move through like air.
Somewhere a river roils with chemicals
from a paper mill, a refinery or plastics factory.
If you want to write, you must court
the combustion, must try to find something
beautiful in a burning river. You must not
turn away. You must want to walk in,
to wade closer to such horror. You have to be willing
to risk burning and drowning at the same time.