A Gentle Art for my mother By Eamon Grennan

I’ve been learning how to light a fire

Again, after thirty years. Begin (she’d say)

With a bed of yesterday’s newspapers--

Disasters, weddings, births and deaths,

All that everyday black and white of

History is first to go up in smoke. The sticks

Crosswise, holding in their dry heads

Memories of detonating blossom, leaf. Saved

from the ashes of last night’s fire,

Arrange the cinders among the sticks.

Crown them with coal nuggets, handling

Such antiquity as behooves it,

For out of this darkness, light. Look,

It’s a cold but comely thing

I’ve put together as my mother showed me,

Down to sweeping the fireplace clean. Lit,

You must cover from view, let it concentrate--

Some things being better done in secret.

Pretend another interest, but never

Let it slip your mind: know its breathing,

Its gulps and little gasps, its silence

And satisfied whispers, its lapping air.

At a certain moment you may be sure (she’d say)

It’s caught. Then simply leave it be:

It’s on its own now, leading its mysterious

Hungry life, becoming more itself by the minute,

Like a child grown up, growing strange.

From “Relations: New and Selected Poems” by Eamon Grennan (Graywolf: 230 pp., $16)