Already I have tasted fire. Tongue to tongue, I have licked its heat and flame, smelled hair singed in my nose. Already I have heard the pop of skin after it blistered. Such pain I did not know until the nerves went numb from the bright explosion. Let me tell you: Fire’s deepest secret is a heart that has no color, and in that heart, the rumble and roar disappear. When I die, the tongues will lick me again, only more fully and only after my spirit has already leapt. Ashes from bone make good dirt.
A phone call at the start to slap me from sleep. Or does it begin before, when a gas explosion scorched my arm and face? Or before that with cells colliding like flint and steel to spark and grow? What nucleus of stress em- bedded in Y and X to grow into that al- most obliterating pitch dark passage of birth? Or did this stress begin generations back with blood of running and blood stopped? Anyway, the call: We need more tests, the voice explains, so, of course, I say yes. Next day I wait alone with Gideon’s black book and Wheel of Fortune loud. Then Nurse punctures skin to plunge liquid into vein. Nuclear isotopes, she explains. To get a better picture. We watch the tiny Chernobyls disappear. They’ll be gone in sixty hours, if you drink lots of water. I drink three cups and want more. Next I lie to watch a space- craft hover over chest beaming my heart across the galaxy of this room. Don’t move, Nurse warns before she leaves. So I stifle each cough, ignore all itches. The machine hums and clicks. Minutes become eons until finally it stops. I breathe and scratch and cough and think of the four s’s in stress test, hissing snakes of steam ssss-ing from valves. No nuclear explosions, yet. So I return to wait in a place invented by stress: cement compressed to pounds per inch; glass from sand burned clear; wood, wind-shaken, rings curling a dark heart— all must pass. Or else. This is why I am here: Once last month when I tried to rest, my heart fluttered like a wren and then slammed the bone bars of my chest for just a moment— before it calmed, unlike the panic in my head. At last, Doc appears while Nurse connects electrodes and I tread the rolling mill. Your heart looks good, Doc says, then adds, So far. Soon I’m huffing, staring at a heart poster. I ask how the blood moves. Doc says, This is the world’s best pump, proud like he made it. Man-made pumps are only a third as good. He taps. Oxygen-depleted blood comes in here. His pen maps blood from heart to lungs to heart to brain. A closed system, nothing better. I’m sweating now and holding tight, steep ground whirring under foot. Yet I get no closer to that heart. I breathe hard, watch the monitor with Doc. This looks good, he nods. Yours went up real smooth, no hitch. I’m going to slow you down. Soon I walk on flat ground. The whirring dies. No more hurry to go nowhere. You’re fine, Doc smiles. No need to invade this time. A little arrythmia, a hiccup of the heart. At home, I hike the woods to heave ax over and over, my body a pump that thunks each round of oak, riving the heart to reveal a salvation of sorts and the slow truth of fire.
Jim Minick is the author of five books, the most recent, Fire Is Your Water, a novel. The Blueberry Years, his memoir, won the Best Nonfiction Book of the Year from Southern Independent Booksellers Association. His honors include the Jean Ritchie Fellowship and the Fred Chappell Fellowship. His poem “I Dream a Bean” was picked by Claudia Emerson for permanent display at the Tysons Corner/Metrorail Station. His work has appeared in many publications including The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Tampa Review, Shenandoah, Orion, Oxford American, and The Sun.
Altered images from 42nd Street, directed by Lloyd Bacon in 1933.
