by Robert Wrigley
from the journals of D. D. Pye (1871–1890)
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For the twigs, being dry and loosely stacked, burned
swiftly, and the kindling, being hewn from a long-standing larch snag,
was also ideally seasoned and crackled brightly into flames.
Then the first small log splits likewise ignited, and I rested there
on my rock, the ever-darkening night cooling the back of my neck
as my face flushed with the glow and heat of the fire.
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This was when I chanced to see an ant emerge
from a hole in the smooth bark side of the last length of wood
I had offered to the flames. Although his situation, surely, could not
have been more dire, he seemed calm in his side-to-side explorations
of the log, scurrying away from an edge only once
when a smoke cloud wafted its acrid breath in his face.
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By way of experiment, I laid a long slender branch
from the stones of the fire ring to the opposite end of what was both
his potential death-plank and temporary salvation, calculating that,
if resourcefulness and survival ticked as saliently in his jet encasement
as it did within my own skin, he would find this route
to safety eventually. Which he did, but as his bad luck would have it,
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from deep within the log he’d perhaps long called home, a pitch pocket,
having reached a temperature from which its brew could no longer expand,
blew with no more than a campfire pop, hardly even a report,
but hard enough to shake from their flaming superstructures
both the log and the bridge I had provided into the flames,
taking the ant as well, whom by now I had in my lonesomeness
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become exceedingly glad for, although he was gone in a instant
in the seethe of those coals. This was the point at which I became aware
first of the excessive heat upon my face, so rapt had I been
at my watching, and then, looking up toward the coolness of the night,
aware also of an abundance of stars beyond any man’s ability
to reason, let alone cipher or bear, let alone be alone beneath.
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