Another poem about fires.
I seem to have an obsession with that.
In my past life, I must have been an arsonist or something.
And the last line--
I don't know where I read it, but there's a line in Spanish,
a maxim, a saying, that, it translated
goes something to the effect--
it's a real dumb saying because it
says when the governments fail, the poets will take over.
And you think the country is badly run now.
Don't think that the buses would run on time
if the poets were driving them.
It also has something to do with--
well, it's one of those down on the farm poems.
And I think you'll understand that.
But in the good old days, they used to have chimney fires.
I don't know if they have them anymore.
The soot and the grease would build up in chimneys.
And I remember as a kid, firemen climbing up
houses and shoveling hoses down chimneys.
Well, there's a chimney fire in this poem.
"Last Fires."
"Even farmers have enough sense to stop
at the moment of excitement.
And after the hogs are slaughtered,
museum pieces cut open hanging in their barns.
Stooped washing up at the pumps.
Already they can see the movies behind their brows.
New fields of milo sprouting.
Row on row, while those judases, the crows, enemies of gravity,
circle over.
Then that night, first sneaking a drink,
they build their last fires, sit holding hands with their wives,
wishing they had chestnuts to roast,
that they had the courage to read 'Snowbound.'
I used to see them through the woods running away from home
again, resting on the hillsides among the bushes where
those dapper gentlemen, the pheasants,
so alert all through the night but hardly dozed.
Bessemer furnaces forming up against the sky--
here, there, across the landscapes.
Even then, hearing the firemen stirring in their firehouses,
dreaming they were in their yellow coats, racing for miles,
calling to one another, climbing ladders where they balanced,
eyes wide in the face of it, pouring buckets down.
Telling myself, even then, thus afflicted,
that when governments fail, the poets take over".