Pyro
By Gregory Pardlo Jr. (’98,’00,’01)

It resisted extinction
on winter’s tongue of earth
because, so long house-bound,
it burned to move. I felt for it
the way Michelangelo felt
for the figure trapped in stone.
On the six o’clock, I am the one gesturing,
heroic to be caught
on camera dancing behind the reporter,
now proud to see
myself transformed
into light, my celebrity
like flint agitating emery
tongues of the envious.
Paparazzi of broken glass
on asphalt mirrored wet and jugular
with hose. Homeless, drunks
and the otherwise extraneous
witness the pomp of flame
persistent as graffiti.
Huddled like hostages
behind a yellow tape,
my audience shivering tiny plumes
into thin air as the critics pimp
wet canvas up the engine ladder
into that burning house.
O to make a wick of myself,
the hot stone in my gut threatening
to ignite up the length of my spine,
rattling my glottis like the lid
on a boiling pot.

Tap water sounds like a fuse.
Strikes the basin and sparks.
Steam rises from what’s burnt away
on the occasion of a kindling,
making a child of destruction
dutifully wash hands
of the sooty ruined thing.
Now they’re showing when the structure began to kneel;
reverent, infantile, innocent, reborn,
revealing timbers like one coming
out of his skin and embers litter the sky
raining hell suspended in the dingy exhaust
of one failed step toward the animate.
Housebound now I
think of joining the swarming,
sifting through all of them,
those glinting wind chimes wincing
at the sigh of my arrival, to reside
aloft like woodsmoke in the night.

From Cave Canem V: 2000 Anthology Copyright © Gregory Pardlo. All rights reserved. Used with permission of the author.

Delaware Valley native Gregory Pardlo completed his MFA at New York University as a New York Times Fellow in poetry. He has received residency fellowships from Breadloaf and the MacDowell Colony. An associate editor of Painted Bride Quarterly, his current and forthcoming publications include work in Hawai’i Review, Callaloo, Lyric, and the Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature & Art, and Bum Rush the Page: The Def-Poetry Jam anthologies. Translator of Danish author Niels Lyngsø's Pencil of Rays and Spiked Mace: Selected Poems, his articles and reviews appear in Black Issues Book Review. Pardlo teaches at New School and John Jay College and lives in Manhattan

Copyright © 1997-2006 by Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.

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