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.