A Restless Geometry

Here lies a fire, never harnessed. Only what it excavates is seen. Witnessed on a black glass screen sometimes. Sometimes it finds us, bringing something one might call beauty to a growing crowd of hidden faces. Beauty, it must be known, that arrives at the end of a day of slaughtered hours, on the ends of blue-tipped bullets. Above the sour of a muddy grave.

If the fire is here, it is a broken compass. If the west is a fire, the east receives its breeze of ashes. Obscured by flames, we claim that emptiness is over there. That the problem is over there. Over there is the plumbing of a soon forsaken house but the broken pipe leaks beneath our feet. The sledgehammer leaving splinters in our hands.

The vultures who call the flooded home “a crappy piece of land” because they want the carrion and hillsides for themselves perch on cliffsides in British Columbia.

In their disavowals, there lies a mobility of fragrances. Sulphur, petrichor, the evaporating tang of static—rising up from epitaphs in every early midday sun. Where too many beloved there are pressed then left to rest.

Through our tiny screens, we can only pretend to hear what echoes from the shovels’ mouths sing. Few—these few too many—can move their lips along with the words of dirges downed into mass graves. Our hearing fails us here. A rill of blood becomes a rumor. We misunderstand a flood. A mudslide. The truth of its geometry is restless. The truth of ours seems useless.