Histories
by Jordan Mounteer
We share in the appetite of flames
as stalks of grass cinder, chasing the fire
which speeds like ants across the field.
Black smoke curdles when it touches
the air, its lunged shape pouring out
behind in enraged Scyllian tails.
Ryan’s father and grandfather behind us
barking orders, where to point the hose,
while they calmly lure and break the blaze
with shovels and rakes, their flannel shirts
nicked with embers. They say the grass
will grow back greener, taking root in the wake
of struggle. Ryan jokes about tradition,
how it can lodge in the most unlikely places,
its traction dragging like a frayed belt across
the appliance of our lives years after
we have forgotten its caliber and use.
A seditious cog in people’s tolerance.
You’d heard it before, all Doukhobors
were pyromaniacs, Sons of Freedom
and all that. But it was the other things,
the schools where they hit you
for speaking Russian, the years in jail,
that bolt down hinges on the door
where our custom for remembering will stop
to remove its shoes before it enters.
In his over-sized gumboots Ryan races ahead
to stomp out a rebel flame trembling
toward a clump of knapweed gone to seed.
Behind him the older men hard under
the fury, three generations carrying fire
like a censured injury, ironing their pounded
smiles, their grass hearts kindled as if
all their histories began with fire.
Jordan Mounteer grew up in the Slocan Valley and graduated from the University of Victoria. His work has appeared in The Malahat Review, Prairie Schooner, The Antigonish Review, Grain, Arc, and The Fiddlhead. He recently won the 2014 PRISM international Poetry Contest and The Adirondack 46er Poetry Prize, and his poems are forthcoming in The Dalhousie Review, Existere, and fillingStation. He is currently in Vietnam somewhere, writing bad werewolf romance novellas to pay the bills.