The smell of campfire smoke

At the edge of the fire

These suns, though lit by our near star’s light,
don’t moon after that primal source, but cite
their own chemical marriage. My temporal
landscape, stopped by red Rothko on a stairwell
when I was nine (his cadmiums stained
me to tears, made me wonder how paint contained
that sadness) saw time bent into n-folded trails
and campfires: I watched Cornell’s scissor-tales
butterfly into mâché-bouquets for dissembling
starlets; Rodin’s rough hands cast a die, gambling
with the clay-foot Muse; Kandinsky’s radiant
topographies map the geography of transcendence.
I’ve sat at the fire’s edge as those alchemists fed
me visions, stardust recombinant, gold from lead.