Firelight on Deem Hills

The wood up here is clean,
Burns not one but a hundred
Perfect fires
One and then another
Pulling, beckoning,
Casting lemon shadows on the boulders
Dropped here long ago by extinct Gods
The way we lob new logs into the pit.

More love surrounds us than we ever had imagined;
The fire calls it to our eyes and to our faces
From the air, from the sky, from the stars.

Below, the valley disrobes
All its lights:
Promiscuous, eternal, fleeting -
The shimmer of emeralds and egyptian gold
Cast up from the double helix streets
Glows for immense distances,
A suitable nest for that mythic bird
That, today at least, roosts here
With us, on this stony peak
In an x of sticks,
Orange these ash resemblences.