Gloria-Leigh Logan photo © Acclaim.com

I stole the spirit of Joshua, the nightwatchman,
one moonful night. He told me the secrets of fire,

told me water sings to diamonds on nights
like that. He said, Listen, always listen,

and when you hear it, run naked
through the cane fields, roll bleeding

in mica slivers and diamond dust
so the sun can see you from the light you share.

He said, Be painful to the eyes of old men,
let your burn light the world.

His hands pulled shadows across the mud
hut walls and he said, Don’t ever cool

till you are these orange coals;
you must blow on it, speak tender things

to the flame—that is how you feed fire.
As he spoke the dim light awoke

to his stories, so that night I stole of him
his fire, carried the coals in my palms,

and ate their orange burn. And I feed them now,
feed them air, the life of my breath,

I feed them what I am: my words.

So I’m sitting on the riverbank with my toes
in the shallows, my feet listening
to the story of mud. Some polywogs riffle

the backwater surface and a waterbug
seems dizzy from the eddied spins.
A dragonfly can’t decide where he was

supposed to be five minutes ago.
Sky is breathless blue. A fish keeps passing,
saying that this is not true,

and that’s a bold-faced lie, but the story
voice is honest and soothing.
It says: I was a dinosaur, a bone,

a tree, some leaves, some stone.
I died a million ways and burned to feathered ash,
I drank rain and touched the feet of passing

things, I held the dying soft, and waited
for the day some hands and fingers, lazy toes—
a keen-eyed child, or some modest potter—

would see in me a thing to create:
a bowl, a cup, some small shard to tell my story
long after I was gone.

Michael Johnson is a native of Bella Coola, British Columbia. He received a BA in creative writing from Lewis-Clark State College. His poems have appeared in the Malahat Review and Clackamas Literary Review. His new favorite bumper sticker reads: Rugby: Elegant Violence.

These pieces were first published in INK POT #2 - 2003, a literary journal.

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