Mistress of Fire

Growing up cold, I will steal the fire to feed the flame.  I will expire.  Until that day, I will surely live beyond the paved city, beyond the crumbling homes.  I will live with blooms and boughs.  I will live with a pin dotted sky of stars.  What do I throw out to the Universe?  Even if it doesn't respond, to me the absurd is just as real.  The realization of the smallness and meaninglessness of it all.  Don't quote me, dear scientist.  I am just reeling in my neediness.  My human need for something, someone, to care, is too strong to deny.  Don't ridicule me for thoughts a human should have.  I'm not a human machine.  It's just the wrong day and you didn't give up your artifacts of fiction.  You didn't tell me it doesn't matter that the sky doesn't care.  It stares without ever blinking.  I am aware of how big that sky is, even when it is shrouded in clouds or crowded with trees.  Those trees pull me up by the tresses, pull me up by my muddy boot straps.  Silly girl, they say.  Draw, they say.  It may be fun to cajole with these leafy hooligans.  I sense, though, that the rest of the world took a secret dig at my small world.  These things happen, to even the sweetest flower, to even the nicest girl.  She may have a flower face and shine up at you.  That girl probably has been dug.  She wears the black seed water bead choker and headband.  She looks happy on the outside.  It's a ways old circle that leads back.  I'm still taking that trek over the catwalk across the moonlighted sky with my dad.  He's still telling us that the men are hanging below us on ropes down in the midnight black abyss.  The chilly wind picks up and moves my long hair.  I dream what it would be like to tumble down there and see them as I fall.  The ghost of the old ones, hanging in dreams, hanging on the bridge with my dad and I.  A last memory.  A memory to last.  He takes us over the bridge.  We survive.  He tells us of hidden gold in the valley.  He talks of thieves and Native curses.  The land will reclaim this place, he said.  I remember it clearly.  That was what he said the curse was.  The trains took the land and the tracks would go, the metal would fall.  After getting over the bridge, after looking into the autumnal orange moon, we walked down into the valley below.  We walked into the darkness, on the wild pathway.  We heard the rustling of animals at night, we heard the babbling creek.  No other humans, just us walking.  We made our way up the ravine, to the other side of the bridge and back out.  We made it out alive.  And in the morning, I awoke to see a sight in the thick morning mist.  A native man with a headdress, tomahawk in hand, walking quietly out of the trees.  Abandoning all of my senses, I was transported.  And even though I slept under the stars, I was awakened to the possibility that dreams are real.  More so than the stars I sought in the sky at night.