Fear, when it subsides, is like that.
Like the cloud of mosquitos along with the occasional horsefly that pestered you all day, making even the walk to the beach a misery.
That impenetrable cloud that finally begins to fade when dusk has gone and night has come
and you have built the fire, sending billowing smoke to heaven.
Clouds of smoke to heaven replacing
clouds of insects;
stinging in your eyes when the wind shifts replacing
stinging everywhere regardless of the breeze.
Fear, when it decides to leave, is like that smoke that in its turn gives way to night air, how cold and clean it is in your lungs when everyone has gone to sleep;
gives way to fireflies which, refusing to swarm, let their lights shine out individual, each a beacon in the glowing dark.
Fear, though, even then, has left its mark on you, smoke and deet deep in the skin, filling up that tent that you are in, fear in all its stinging majesty reduced to scent which is, after all (and only) the purest form of memory.
No danger in it now; just a thing which was,
which you will now recall, years later, driving with the windows down past a field and a stand of trees, smelling, before you see it, the smoke from a fire, burning distant and elsewhere.
Fear, when it subsides, is like that.
Like the cloud of mosquitos along with the occasional horsefly that pestered you all day, making even the walk to the beach a misery.
That impenetrable cloud that finally begins to fade when dusk has gone and night has come
and you have built the fire, sending billowing smoke to heaven.
Clouds of smoke to heaven replacing
clouds of insects;
stinging in your eyes when the wind shifts replacing
stinging everywhere regardless of the breeze.
Fear, when it decides to leave, is like that smoke that in its turn gives way to night air, how cold and clean it is in your lungs when everyone has gone to sleep;
gives way to fireflies which, refusing to swarm, let their lights shine out individual, each a beacon in the glowing dark.
Fear, though, even then, has left its mark on you, smoke and deet deep in the skin, filling up that tent that you are in, fear in all its stinging majesty reduced to scent which is, after all (and only) the purest form of memory.
No danger in it now; just a thing which was,
which you will now recall, years later, driving with the windows down past a field and a stand of trees, smelling, before you see it, the smoke from a fire, burning distant and elsewhere.
Which makes you whisper into the windshield the wish — or prayer — that they who burn would breathe and find, at last, in that simple effort of letting out and taking in, what lies beyond the smoke — a cool and clean night air.
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