Vox Populi
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Traci Brimhall: Museum of Fire
The yard is spangled with a benign pandemic of dandelions,
soft gold waiting to mature into wishes, and we are waiting
for the fevers to pass. We stay indoors, build robots out
of recycling and domino labyrinths, snap plastic Lego bricks
into towers and cars. My son wants to make a skyscraper
that is also a Museum of Fire, floors rising with the heat.
On the first story my son and I make the history of fire,
on the second he wants to make where we are, the slow
smolder of Kansas and its controlled burns, transparent
orange flames tucked into tall grasses. We keep the news
on mute, learn history on toys, and on the third story
we place the O’Leary cow kicking the lantern towards
Chicago. Outside the window, two tulips compete with
the redbud to be pinkest. Spring wants to be a calendar
of bee seductions. Inside, we build the museum’s next
story–the Library of Alexandria. My son doesn’t ask what
scrolls turned to smoke, so I don’t have to say no one knows.
Fragments survive ruin. Dust. Stories. Instead he asks if
the phoenix on the roof with its ersatz blaze is real, and
because I want him to be brave, I say maybe it was once.
Maybe this is an ash year. We must be patient and let it all
happen to us—the consuming, the unfeathering, the body
mentored by pain, a student of its own burning. When he
goes to the window, my son sees it and calls for my camera
to capture it, there in the sky, a myth made cirrostratus
and stretched but, yes, there, and it opens, it grows, it rises.
~~~~
Traci Brimhall’s next collection, Love Prodigal, will be published by Copper Canyon Press in 2024. She is the author of four other collections of poetry.
Poem copyright 2024 Traci Brimhall
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“Outside the window, two tulips compete with
the redbud to be pinkest. Spring wants to be a calendar
of bee seductions.”
A beautiful poem by a beautiful poet.
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Thanks, Lisa. I agree!
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Wow!
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Exactly. Wow.
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One to read again and again. Timing perfect for isolation and fires.
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I agree!
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I am going to have to boast– do forgive me: Traci is one of my former students and I have followed her progress since the early 2000s. She is one of those students you never forget, so powerful was her work even during the first weeks in the workshop. Since then I have her four books, read her avidly and with awe –and am so very proud of her! Thank you, dear Michael for posting this poem of hers. And the photo shows, truly, how she is: warm, smiling, full of a deeply intelligent and beautiful energy!
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Thanks, Laure-Anne. I didn’t know that Traci was a student of yours, but I’m not surprised. The clear evocative language, the well-chosen details, the precise craft…. Yes, the two of you share an aesthetic.
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A joy to read. “soft gold waiting to mature into wishes”–nice!
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lovely, John. Thank you!
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love it. a poem to ponder and re-read, and marvel with. A new poet for me, and one to explore.
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The poem works as a humorous almost-surrealist anecdote about home-schooling, and yet it rises to become an allegory of the world we’ve created.
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I’ve never read this poet before now, but the claims of her brilliance by my friends who have are apparently true.
Very fine!
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Yes, Traci truly is brilliant.
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