From the Black Notebook: Fire Sermon

These pages filled with prayers for fire…Its imagined cleansing or galvanization.  A hubris no doubt to be checked by the furnace and its indifference to my desires, that is to say, it lays them bare for the burning they are.  The false hope that in the light of torch or the heat of kiln, a glimpse of truth might appear. Or that my heart might ignite into some self-illuminating beacon instead of the bitter, brittle and broken potsherds of a jug that once contained sweet wine, the blood decocted fruit from some solemn cultivar against the chaos of creation.  And yet still I yearn for the enlivening turn, the lick of flame, the blessed touch of destruction.

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