Not often have I tasted ceremony, but I remember
taking orders from an Indian named Snowbear,
who, as darkness flooded our 8th grade campout,
tied us to trees with thread he dared us not to snap,
and I won the bet, motionless while millipedes
poked me like fingers from the grave, silent
when he called game over, a wild thing openly hiding,
silent and brave and still even as his boots
trampled through fallen leaves with steps
that sounded like brush fire; Outward Bound,
but I thought I was a Native child, and I have tried
to return to that day when I lingered between worlds,
but instead I am a gawker in the Florida Parishes
where it’s never quite safe–sunset, for example,
through the pine trees’ bristles, is just
a fire with teeth, and there is fire everywhere–
burn piles, brush fires, smoke pits stuffed with boar,
lazy fires set in paint cans on purpose and left
unsupervised for the firefighters find, only
they themselves are–how shall I say it–lackadaisical-
lite on water, heavy on wait-and-see, meanwhile
the woods consume themselves, while down the road
the meth lab rages, that took the boy and his father
who entered the inferno after him, and almost certainly
too late, the soft bellies of Fire District #12 rolled in;
short on hydrants and sleep, they hauled water
in tanks that Houdini in his straight jacket
would have aimed for, and it was magic they needed,
or a miracle, but only morning answered, along with smoke
speaking its language of the snake, yet within six months
the dump trucks delivered mounds of red clay,
and like that the earth was on fire again, which is how
the Choctaw and Tchefuncte pre-fabbed Louisiana,
by hauling woven baskets of earth to add a shoulder
or a wrinkle or spoked wheel, making sacred spaces
for us to desecrate, because we forget who came before,
and we always hate the ones who come after us,
for the change they bring, their unfamiliar dust,
their army of surveyors applying machetes
to the tender undergrowth, claiming another rancid slab
of swamp for a housewife with paint chip dreams;
does she know about the fire, the teddy bear shrine,
that the boy continues, stalled at three years old,
how I can almost see him in footy pajamas, pouting,
dragging his sooty blanket down the garden path
of the new house where new children scream and kick
at the sky on their swing set, fresh-stained cedar
anchored in a mound where the meth lab used to be,
where he lay mute until his dreams smoked out,
beside his father who went back in after him–
each drive-by it’s a different nightmare, but always
the trees lean in, their lesser branches charred.