Fire in the Deutsche Bank Building, NYC
For Joseph Graffagnino and Robert Beddia

Sizzle, gallop, pushing spew of spark and angle
fire beyond its normal rage and human border,
threatening skin. And Joseph's cage is soft, collapsing,
barely, very barely, managing to hold in
drumming heart, staccato claw, a melting language.
Landscape still beneath him, arms still blindly flailing,
Bobby must remember that to squelch the blazing
means to resurrect deceit, to conjure just the
dream of water on the tongue. The fools who
seek to save a wall must learn to swallow knots of
flame, and all the time must dream of certain current.
Shuttered throats go searching for a scream, a way to
sing the day alive, to wash their shrinking roads with
rivers, whiskey, anything that flows. We're running out of
air. The blazing riddle-spits, confounds the breeze and
whittles towards the bones of both of them. For days the
idle sated smoke will drift like soft religions
skyward, till a bored commuter shakes his head, then
sniffs distractedly and turns some paper's page.

Patricia Smith's four books of poetry include Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series selection and winner of the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award in Poetry; Blood Dazzler, a book of poems chronicling the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, which will be published in 2008. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review and many other journals--in addition, she is a Pushcart Prize winner, a Cave Canem faculty member and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam.  NYC reminds her what her hometown of Chicago would be if it were doused briefly in an exciting vat of acid.

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Keywords : Fire, FDNY, Manhattan

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