Ashes
The hearth-space holds what fires cannot burn:
the child's drawing, creased and faded;
the letter addressed but never sent;
the thing he meant to say
but swallowed instead.
Ash is soft. It holds the shape
of what it was, the log's rings,
the coal's dark veins,
before becoming powder,
before becoming this:
proof of transformation
that looks like erasure.
The grandmother kept the ashes
of her husband in a tin
on the inglenook shelf,
and sometimes I think she knew
that grief, like fire,
requires its own small chamber.
Requires boundaries.
Requires a place that understands
that not all warmth is life,
and not all smoke is signal.
She dusted around that tin for forty years,
never moving it, never forgetting.
Some people are corners meant for keeping.
Corner Stone
The hearth remembers what we forget
each family that crouched here, breathing smoke,
their knees drawn up like parentheses
around a grammar of flame.
You can feel them in the brick,
those centuries of elbows,
the small indentations where children pressed
their foreheads to the warmth
and dreamt the world smaller.
I am here because I needed
to believe in thickness,
in walls that hold their heat
long after the fire dies.
My hands on these stones are cold,
but I can almost feel the palms
of someone's grandmother,
the heat still living in the mortar,
passed down like a recipe
no one writes down,
only knows by touching.
Returning
I dreamt the house again,
not as it was, but as it wanted to be:
the inglenook larger, deeper,
its brick walls widening
like arms learning to hold more.
The fire burned without wood,
without fuel, without diminishment.
It simply was, continuous, blue,
the way love is supposed to work
in the stories we tell children.
When I woke, my hands still held the warmth.
I understood then that some places
don't need us present
to keep burning.
They exist in the grammar of memory,
in the way we return
not to retrieve what was lost,
but to return ourselves,
remade by distance, by time,
by the long work of forgetting
how to be afraid
of a fire
that only lights.
We come back to the corner
of our own small hearts
and find it waiting,
exactly as we left it,
only deeper now,
only more true.
After/Thought Literary 