There is a Fire that Burns in Us All

A thin millimetre of steam
Pours out of the top log
From some protected inner sanctum
And wisps upward
Born by the hex of the orange hot wood coal
That looks to be pre-molten rock
From the inner cliff of some raging volcano.

I am waiting for the orange-hot bridge
To burn through and collapse
Under the weight of the steamy log above
Which burns by the same flame
So that the bridge feeds the force
That lightens its load even as it saps its own strength.

The embers below glow on and off in waves
As though speaking with tongues and chatting with each other.
The bursting crash of the breakdown comes suddenly,
Setting all aflame with a new intensity
As though destruction naturally inspires, excites and enrages,
Even without mind or blood.

Why do they lick along just those lines
Here and there, the flames
Now blue, now yellow, now white, now orange?
As they break apart each log
They portray the structure of its being in chambers
As though magnifying the cellular core beneath
While through the solid wood burns
Bright embers of red light
Alight from within or showing through
A fragile slice, appearing solid,
Already mostly burned
So that what seems substance
Is only facade.

I am a god just to see this whole, bright almost improbable scene;
The majesty and mystery of substance departing into air
By the lion of light and heat; The Destroyer of Worlds.
Over the 451 line leads to the exit door of earth;
Exchanging privilege for freedom.
In this brilliant dance,
This great burn shadow of the sun,
Herself shadow of the beginning bang,
Where creation and destruction are one,
God gives us this window of His own eyes.

The Heroic Mudskipper

If you have ever seen the mudskipper fish of Japan in action you have precisely in your mind the moment evolution means when life crawled from the waters and walked upon the earth.  This fish flaps his fin-cum arms in straining circles out of shallow water to flop about in the mud in a concentrated effort of forward motion.  Then he sucks at the air with the same effort of a man unwilling to die of emphysema.   All-in-all he seems so silly and labored that you want to tell him to just go back where he came from ("back to Bulgaria" as Rick in Casablanca would say). And if you are not there at first, all you need to see is the mudskipper's ridiculous mating "dance" (literally a flop) where he launches himself into the air in a "jump" as though he was stuck on the heavy gravity of Jupiter, in the desperate hope that some female might see him rise above the mire and actually be attracted.  Perhaps this somehow explains the behavior of certain males on the disco floor.

Although the mudskipper illustrates almost perfectly how life could have come upon land (many might prefer the frog for this purpose which is practically performing pirouettes compared with the mudskipper), it seems to cry out to me for a wholly different interpretation of evolution.  It would seem that there is nothing so incredibly "willful" as this effort except that everywhere you turn you find such incredible efforts in nature.  Take, just for one, the Gob waterfall climbing fish, which swims up stream from the salt water environment to the fresh into the pounding tumultuous serf of high Hawaiian waterfalls where he quite deliberately begins to climb the face where no man would dare.  In an effort that makes salmon look like light-weights, the Gob sucks his way up hundreds of feet of water-pounded rock, where many are thrown back to their deaths, just to reach the calm of the upper pools (which seem hardly different, save lonelier, than where he began).  This is the very definition of "will power".  In the face of this incredible determination how can one begin to believe it is the chance by-product brought about by the arbitrary event of a random mutation?  It is insulting to suggest that these heroic efforts are pure blind driven genes as though the boys that hit the beaches of Normandy knew no better what they risked, sacrificed and cared for then do dumb fish that flop in the sun.

No, I prefer to think that the biologist Lamarck had it right before Darwin; that it is in the striving that genetic changes are born.  It is in the will that they have their origin.  This instead makes beauty, courage, and poetry of Life rather than dumb luck.  And it is in truth closer to the real life we know.  But more importantly, it honors choice.  It says that life rewards those who try and tells each of us what we know to be true in our hearts; that the sons and daughters inherit from the mothers and fathers the world they strive to create, not only in their bank accounts, but more importantly in their blood.  Someday the scientists will know this as well as the poets do.

Gift

God has not given
Me a great love
But instead,
The Greatest Love.

Art

From the air
The rugged little island mountain
Looks like the imperfect
Lion, legs outstretched,
That as a child
I made for mom.

In the untrespassed sanctity I touched the Face

GOD! BEAUTY SUPREME! 
A rainbow that rims a hole in the sky! 
Sunset reflecting off the ice of Greenland over the snowy mountains,
Whips of risen white particled light,
Fjords of ice merging a seemingly seamless sunset of earth and sky;
Flying North and West in Winter
Crescents and curves of mountains
Smiling to the last of the long day,
Burnished by the Southern Sun,
Rock cliffs showing a deep ragged gold
Over the icey lakes and mountains
As endless as the sunset,
As though for a moment the frozen land
And flying hand had frozen time.
Then it woke with the tongue of a glacier,
Stuck out as if from God's open mouth;
NAH! NAH!
Catch me if you can!
This "tongue shall forth your praise",
Lapping at the icey water of the Fjords,
Mocking the wide-open, mind-numbing,
Jaw-dropping awe of our own stupidity,
While others watched "The Muppets" inside the darkened plane;
Then swept and sweeping snow fields down mountain sides;
God's long laughing furrows
Like highways among the mountains,
Sings my soul skipping
Along these roads of God's wonder.
Ice crystals on the windows sharing the rainbow,
The West wind kicks up snow dust in tne mountains
For the sunset to dapple with,
Flipping his pancakes of the feast ingredients; snow, mountain, wind, sun and ice
Into the long frying-pan plains of lumpy blanketed snow,
Unblemished by man or beast;
The face of God's smooth-perfect skin.
With only a moment to feel sad the passing glory of the moutains
Like life led into the clean white perfection of Heaven
Earth moves into sky;
Snow indistinguishable from cloud.