Fires of artifice

by John Hollander

ADAM'S TASK  

                            And Adam gave names to all cattle, and

                            to the fowl of the air, and to every

                              beast of the field . . . Gen 2: 20

Thou, paw-paw-paw; thou, glurd; thou, spotted

   Glurd; though whitestap, lurching through

The high-grown brush; though pliant-footed,

   Implex; thou, awagabu.

Every burrower, each flier

   Came for the name he had to give:

Gay, first work, ever to be prior,

   Not yet sunk to primitive.

Though, verdle; though, McFleery's pomma;

   Thou; though; thou --- three types of grawl;

Thou, flisket; though, kabasch; though, comma-

   Eared mashawk; thou, all; thou, all.

Were, in a fire of becoming,

   Laboring to be burned away,

Then work, half-measuring, half-humming,

   Would be as serious as play.

Thou, pambler; thou, rivarn; thou, greater

   Wherret, and thou, lesser one;

Thou, sproal; thou, zant; thou, lily-eater.

   Naming's over. Day is done.

FIREWORKS

Fire is worst, and fires of artifice thirst after more than

             Water does and consume

  More than the world: the night within which the world

      Turns more brightly than we can even

          Guess burns out, while tears in a black

          Retina spurn hope of repair and

              Flare into smoky whisps.

Whispered desire for firing darkness with history, fleeing

            Lights that are strung along

  Mirroring darkened waters, hissing itself

     Upward, dying in aspiration,

         Quenched in night; declaring themselves,

        Candles burn down, rockets burn up in

            Moments they will outlive.

    No light can outlast darkness. But light

Is all we have to live by. Fire plays over creation

              But fireworks must do more

          Than remind. Out of the earth's heart

          Flaming salts fly upward into

          Pieces of darkness and spark,

      Silence of spaces tha ttrusting, following,

              Faces expect them to die in.

                   High in that night

         The end comes in a cottony silence,

And then the painful crack begotten of all the unquietness

      Yet to be: a death too much like life.

O! like white needles in the mind's dark forests, thrust

           Up against the ear-drummed brain

           O see, O hear the rocket die!

      (Whorls and realms of light leap out, leap

  Upward to color, to traces of shape, to life)

                  Darkness was first

          And fire followed in violet, white and

Astonishments of orange, shot at the rim of emerging time,

        Widening, as still it is: around

The full moon, nigh above this wide pavilion, hangs

          An interior unpierced

          Until the bunched homunculus

       Head of one high-arching squib rakes

   Down at the sphere, penetrates and escapes inside

            The moon,

     To the light that bleaches its fire

With the inaudible big bang,

The sudden thudding of shock when created

Pain, reflected in rings of thunder

     Becomes an eternal remembrance.

We who have been burned, we who have watched

The sights of firing life, still celebrate

   Fire with fire. Bright times

      Are remembered in heightened nights

For benched spectators, awaiting streaks of light

   Above the grandstand, in the park

   In the darkness of wild July. When the past

Burst, erupting into event, the flames

           Came hard upon

   The explosion, but burnings of celebration

Flare up before the crash. The cranium

   Of the world's darkened bowl seems now to crack.

We who have returned, guarding our hearts

From burning memory will not again become

   Children bewildered. Wild eyes

      Are forgotten, and frightening lights

Are quenched in blanketing darkness. Sheets of fire

   And screaming whitenesses of dream

   Are redeemed from fear of life by the black

Night of generation itself, by flights

          Of upward love,

   Into your most interior hollows, O my

Sole light, my muse, my mind's uranium

   In whose star-pierced urn all my ashes die!

       For half of life

   Nights came so that I might burn

   Like a Roman candle, high inside

      The blacknesses of summer.

   Then there were fireworks. Flesh

      Learns of its half

   Of death from the mind's flashbulb white

       Coming into being, seeing

Something that must come of all this burning,

All this becoming something other than darkness.

from John Hollander, Selected Poetry, 1995