which is to say, a cleansing

at the peat level in U Minh Thuong, man
grove and indigo, the densities
of flora which deaden radio signals
exuberant life. How can this long
advert get through

a history in which all events are the same?
By faint diffused light which remarks
the steps of the travellers
through no snow on the foreground
and no crow-claw in ink; by
the light filtered through a pint of blood
to which it links.  By ire and walnut-
crusher leaning on the learner eye.

Reviewed he had to take this stand
because he was no longer covered with a skin.
Do you see what I'm saying
who is this one person the relic who wants
to know life
is getting better, depending on us
in Cau Mau, Numaniyah.
Some fanatical voices on the radio.
They don't know how right they are

to be dispersed as a mist or a foam
a text of noughts: C, P, O,
H, N, the record
conserved in the fulgent
martian head of the child of the exposed
peasant and on the helix: up five
all life climbs to air. 
Thumbs the hand bearing

its light into darkest English, of history
in decay, to unlock the manufacturing
process and reveal a simple thesis
distilled for strife: that the edges
of history, past grill and lounger,
are eating inward as fire.  My house
its fringe of chemical light, my child
will get sick as we all do.  I am making us
a firebowl of auger of bay, to see her
is easy to see all I can I would
                     like to call
              your attention 'p

here's the church, here's the steeple,
open the doors and see all the people dipping
their digits into a font of automatic fire:
clothes of the damaged to be baptised in saline,
tunics of the irrecuperable can melt on them,
the congregation reads in the glow of the lamb

'if you dip a finger in it
'it burns like a candle but produces no injury.

So open the texts, the source code a closely-guarded
state secret punishable immediate thunder.
Find what was keeping in the Bihac pocket,
the fighting compartment, abandoned
Andorinhas burned houses in the mountains
and the mountain itself. Find ourselves

in a coin war, primed to consume
the burnt, the wood, the stones, the dust,
lick up the water in the trench, to pay
whatever it costs in broken vessels
drive the point away.

All things are an equal exchange
for fire and fire for all things,
as goods are for gold and gold for goods
If that is true, if money is sterile
and blood in exchange carries congenital defect,
                    all life on fire going out
                    and rekindling in a circuit:
then destruction the rule of measure in change
for moderns like me, to circum
vent the law through a change of terms

e.g.    mark 77    mirabilis    reform
But to code in simple fricative repeat's
a copout you process the interminable present
nude with content, as if repetition were endurance.
Wildfire is tame, modified clawed
broiler and combust engine made in the infants of cities
though energy is natural, a fountain
arcs illumination from Texas to Medes
depending on the altruistic solar centre.
It mewls and flashes its tongue on the trays.

Fire alone can be fed, kept captive
like a vestal helpmeet, lady or return it to the wild
let fly from canisters a living payload
to prowl the brush bury in an acreage
whose future growth it claims by tender.
         The Persians back their
kitchens on the large and bright, free fire,
by which the clerical resistance can flow perpetually.
Rag-headed splinters drenched in the Tiber
by frenzied women.  In Lebanon
they were waiting for the pitch
the tow, the puffed
                               Told by the CEO
to wipe the grass and young
plants in the dog days, we bury our hopes
in the autumn

rain begins to fall, the earth takes
its fire to all the inhabitants. As if the planet
were a woman, living, turned against us,
and the stars pin-hole cameras in a lacquer of burning
bark around a tree...

I have tried to make in a month what the sun
accomplishes in a year as in the brass sphere,
an excess, believing

if in fire we are in our element
then something can displace us,

that the hope is in
the recitation

I might find not fire
but thick water