Between Saving and Falling

It’s no small thing to walk
Into a room where flames
Partner and  dance over wood before hiding in
Walls, waiting for the music to get louder--
A chorus of the burning.
He’s there now,
Each breath glistening
Fog in the oxygen mask
As he paces the darkness, never quite sure when
The fire will give up one of its unwilling human partners,
Black soot staining the nostrils,
Flesh decorated by flame.
And it’s difficult for him to reconcile
How easily a human becomes a corpse
And how the smell of flesh consumed
Never quite burns itself out.
And even though the fire slips away momentarily,
The flames always return, reaching for him
But somehow, his feet are lighter
Than the music he can’t hear
And even when he’s burdened
With the living or the dead,
Encumbered by the possibility he carries,
He falls toward the gaping silence
Which leads him into the night
And he never categorizes what he carries
As a body or a soul
Until he escapes the maddening notes
Rising from the destruction
Like flickers of amber trapped
Within the building’s collapsing music staff.

(c) 2007 Maria Rachel Hooley.  All Rights Reserved.