THE CONFLAGRATION

Every time the man took a step forwards a new blaze emerged. He was wearing fake leather shoes – a shiny blue colour – but even so, the sparks still leapt into flame at every step. He took two steps towards the shoe shop where he’d newly bought the shoes and the fire rose up in his wake. Another man shouted at him: “Stand still! If you don’t stop, the whole place will be on fire!” The Fire Starter (that’s what we’ll call him today) was afraid. He could see that each footstep in his blue shoes was creating havoc. He could feel the intense heat of the tiny fires that began just as soon as he lifted his heel from the pavement. He couldn’t believe that fire could jump into life like this, that even concrete could support fire in this way. As he stood still, he began to tremble. His face trembled, his limbs trembled, his torso began to shake and when his mind saw what was happening to him, he knew without doubt, without the slightest hesitation or consideration that the right thing to do was to run.

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The Man In The Street

Dear ones, the day is long and short at the same time. The man in the street is fat and thin at the same time. How do I know? Because the tears he’s crying tell me so. The tears he’s crying are rich in salt and water, both of which have very old stories to tell indeed. The salt tells the story of the thin man who withdraws from the world because he’s afraid of the way the fat man kills everyone. The water tells the story of the fat man who fights the world because he’s afraid of the way the thin man diminishes everything. All tears hold this truth. That’s what makes them roll down the man’s face with such rapidity – truth weighs a fair amount. Truth plus gravity = downpour, deluge, a flood of tears.

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RODNEY’S SPOON?

Once upon a time there was a spoon and Someone said it belonged to Rodney. Someone with a long neck and bulging eyes said everyone knew it belonged to Rodney because way back when it had the letter R burnt into the handle. But even though the R is nowhere to be seen these days – the spoon is old and worn – everyone knows that R stands for Reality, not Rodney. Nobody around here is called Rodney, no matter how adamant Someone is.

The spoon is made of dark matter and has all the attributes of light matter: shape, finite form, colour, weight – all things that can be measured. And of course, it has all the things that can’t be measured, too. This is the story of those things.

Someone saw the spoon in my kitchen and got irate because I’m not Rodney. Look, I said to Someone, you can’t be irate with me. This isn’t Rodney’s spoon, it’s mine. Except of course, it’s not mine because nobody owns anything. Sure, my friend Jack gave it to me, but that still doesn’t mean it’s definitively and always and forever mine. I might give it to Someone Else, though this is unlikely because I love it. Or I might die and my children might use the spoon after my body has broken down. That’s likely.

The truth is, the spoon is happy being in my kitchen and wants nothing to do with Rodney. How do I know this? It’s obvious in the way it sits on my kitchen worktop or stirs my porridge or rests in the drawer, dozing.

Someone doesn’t like this truth, but isn’t that always the way of it.

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When the sun rises over the ocean, over the Albanian mountains, over the limestone shores of Corfu, we sigh with joy for the new day on this gracious earth; a day on which we are still standing, even as we are wild with God’s fire in trunk, in limbs, in crown. We stand together with the knowledge of this fire inside us and we know it’s a conflagration that can never be doused.

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One of the ex-abbots had been a recluse, a hermit’s hermit, for years. The recluses come into the community only for Christmas and Easter. The rest of the time they stay in the for…

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I also have no desire to read (or to do anything much!). I read The Hole partly out of a desperation to prove to myself that I can still enjoy reading. And there’s the clue. Reading has been such a central part of my life these past forty or so years, that not reading is felt by the ego as a kind of death. Not writing elicits the same egoic fear, or used to – not writing has become so familiar that the fear no longer arises. Egoic fear is just wobbly darkness anyway; it has no real substance (it comes & goes).

When I try to think about or remember books I’ve loved, this same blankness descends. Nothing. No images arise, no feelings. It’s as though the entire library of my mind has been deleted. I’m sure menopause aids this process, but this isn’t entirely down to hormones. There’s a part of this Em Strang being that knows this is a necessary purgation and the I-creature has no say in the matter. Well, so be it! (She says blithely! In fact, this is the hardest path I’ve ever walked.)

In the meantime, here’s the poem by Kabir that I wanted to share, translated by Robert Bly in Kabir, Ecstatic Poems (Beacon Press, 2004):

There's a moon in my body, but I can't see it!
A moon and a sun.
A drum never touched by hands, beating, and I can't hear it!

As long as a human being worries about when he will die, 
and what he has that is his,
all of his works are zero.
When affection for the I-creature and what it owns is dead,
then the work of the Teacher is over.

The purpose of labour is to learn;
when you know it, the labour is over.
The apple blossom exists to create fruit; when that comes,
the petals fall.

The musk is inside the deer, but the deer does not look for it;
it wanders around looking for grass.

What do I feel when I look at this image of Meinrad’s? I feel a kind of divine sorcery is present, a mischievous expression of the ineffable. I feel joy, a delicious audacity and propulsion – looking at the image makes my body want to move like the shaman moves, to dance or march like the shaman marches. It must be because something in the way Meinrad made images connects not just to the mind but to the living body of the viewer. In the quiet moments of viewing this image, a part of me becomes the shaman coyote, recognises the part of myself that already is the shaman coyote.

Art doesn’t get any closer than that. When there’s this transubstantiation of what the artist has made into what the viewer experiences, the generous alacrity of art is known. What do I mean by that? I have no idea. It’s a felt sense that something is exchanged. If I try to analyse it, it dissolves.

This is the last of the ekphrastic poems I wrote in response to Meinrad’s work, published in Firebird. I loved her work from the first moment I came across it and as the years fly by, this love only deepens. That’s a beautiful thing to experience – a deepening love – and something of great value in a world on fire with its own lovelessness. Rest in peace, Meinrad Craighead, and thank you.

Bosque Fire Shaman
In Memoriam Meinrad Craighead

A local child made this story up –
the one about the fire shaman walking a tightrope.

If you’re still enough to listen,
you can hear the rope twanging and shivering in the heat.

There it is, look, stretched out across the burning treetops
like prayers trembling above war!

Hola, tightrope!
Hola, shaman!

The child says the shaman breathes with her feet,
inhales the hot, smoke-filled air and exhales the unbroken world
with every miraculous step.

She trots the tightrope as though it’s a wide, empty road.
There she goes, soothing from hot edge to hot edge.

The child says she’s a vessel for lost souls,
a glass of holy water tilted at the lip of tomorrow.

Sometimes the very old something is inside a mossy mound or a wood-pigeon or a robin. In particular, robins – those feisty, territorial birds – seem to inhabit this very old oldness. It must be because their breasts are orange like the setting sun.

In the days before Christmas, as I was planting tulip bulbs in all the places the soil was soft enough, I remembered that the 21st century earth is only as old as counting and measuring, which means the-earth-as-we-don’t-know-it is ageless, beyond number. It exists without the need of years, outwith time. In this way, the-earth-as-we-don’t-know-it is similar to a robin: it ‘exists’ (that’s what we call it) and then changes into something else or ‘disappears’, without so much as a nod to eternity.

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Look at this image of Meinrad’s – it could be anything! On its own, without the caption, it doesn’t signify anything in particular, which lets it signify everything and nothing simultaneously.

It’s an image, black, white, red, with shapes and patches of shading, dark and light. It could be three fingers, three trees, three ideas. But Meinrad made three coyote tails appear and she did it because at least three coyotes died in a bush fire that night. She chose to commit their memory to paper. And that was that. I don’t think the image has meaning or purpose beyond this – and I think that’s the point.

One of the reasons I love Meinrad’s art so much is precisely because the tails are just tails, the fire is just fire, all things are just themselves, to no end except the play and eventual death of the finite form. Does Meinrad record the coyotes in order to communicate a message of commitment to and care for them? I don’t think so, not least because this is a given. I think she made images of them because she saw and knew that the meaninglessness of being – the unadorned is-ness of all beings – is the highest truth and the greatest freedom. To me, each image celebrates existence, without the need for any additional purpose or meaning.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with making meaning. Perhaps this image means a lot to some viewers – great! For me, though, freedom is in seeing without ascribing additional meaning. Then tails can be tails, fire can be fire, death can be death, destruction of the forest can be destruction of the forest. Seeing like this might sound cold and matter of fact, but in reality it makes for profoundly caring humans: seeing like this requires the heart to be cracked open by radical innocence. I’m pretty sure Meinrad’s heart had significant fissures.

Coyote Tails Burning

In the rainy season,
the tails cannot imagine
this lusty blaze
inside the follicle
of each hair.
The tails swing
out together,
brother-sister tails
being run by
the animal body.
The tails are alone
and apart from
one another.
The tails are one.
Inside the will
of each tail,
a memory of fire
at the beginning
of time.
“This is where
we’re going,”
sing the tails,
as they’re laid out
and burnt clean.
Even the cartilage
is burnt to ash.
Then the tails rise up
in adoration.

• Soak the roots in water whilst reassuring them they have come to a good home.

• Say a prayer to celebrate the soil and encourage its fertility.

• Thank the rose bushes repeatedly for their presence and for the future blooms that are already alive in the garden imaginarium.

• Sing a little song of thanks to the water, to the prepared bed & to the rose roots and shoots.

• As you place the rose bush in the earth, make sure their roots are spread in the way the rose bush wishes to spread them.

• Be generous with good compost.

• Firm in each one, as though you’re swaddling a beloved child.

• When all the rose bushes have been planted, listen to their song, witness their excitement at being in a new home alongside each other. This is what happiness looks and sounds like. Know this happiness to be shared in all four directions and across thresholds we humans wish we had names for.

• Give thanks for being the Chief Weeder alongside the Head Gardener, and learning something new about roses.

Roses emit a special quality of light that only roses emit. So too each plant, of course. So too, each human. But the light that roses emit is especially dear to me and when I’m in their presence, there’s a sense of the boundlessness of love. It’s no wonder they represent the flower of lovers.

When I walk by them, I feel the pull of their presence. It’s as though they have tiny antennae that tune into the Chief Weeder’s frequency and she can’t help but go to them and whisper silly songs in silly voices. This pleases them greatly and they never mind whether I know their names or not, whether I’m adept as caring for them or not – as long as I listen.

Roses have no need of names. This is always a revelation to me. How liberating to exist without the need of names, to be in on the cosmic joke!

Since May this year, I’ve been working alongside my husband as a gardener. He’s a trained horticulturist with 30+ years of experience. I WWOOFed (willing workers on organic farms) in my 20s and pottered in the gardens of our various homes over the years. I’ve tended flowers, shrubs and veg, but what useful facts do I remember? A few plant names, the names of a few pests (who never consider themselves pests). In short, I’ve forgotten pretty much all the factual information I learnt back then, so returning to the garden now is like beginning anew.

So much of the work surprises me – Oh, I remember you, you’re Aruncus! – but what surprises me most is that I like being an amateur, an ignoramus even; I like it when members of the public come up to me (we’re working for a charity in the Scottish borders) to ask about a particular plant and I have no idea what it’s even called. I like telling them that I’m the Chief Weeder and we laugh together and look closely at the stems and leaves; we study the bloom. Maybe some small memory will return to one of us – sometimes it does. It’s in these moments that the hospitality of my ignorance becomes clear. Contrary to what I’ve spent most of my life believing, not knowing has wings.

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This image and ekphrastic poem have grim titles: Meinrad Craighead witnessed the death by fire of a number of coyotes in the Bosque Fire on the banks of the Rio Grande in 2004, and she chose to make this image in the aftermath. It’s a kind of prayer and an honouring of the life of this one coyote and of all coyotes. Here it lies, its guts spilling out, exhausted and torn open by the raging fire of its time. Its physical life is over, but here it remains in the charcoal image of the eye’s sweet love.

My poem in response to this image somehow stretched the title. I don’t remember why I did this. I changed it from ‘Disemboweled Coyote’ to ‘Coyotes Disembowelled’. I wonder why? Isn’t it funny how the poetic mind makes these small adjustments, without the rational mind getting a look in? But that’s a silly nonsense, too – to separate out the ‘minds’ like that. That’s not how it is; it’s just that words can’t get close enough to say how it really is. It’s stretchy. That’s the best I can do today.

I love this image and I love this poem because they both sing of the reality of death, the horror of loss, the horror of death, the reality of loss, and at the same time they both celebrate life and death. Life is precious, of course, and so is death.

Coyotes Disembowelled

Outside time, the coyotes are burning.
The coyotes are burning and bursting open.
The insides of coyotes are lapsing and slipping out
into the woodland inferno.

The fire is coyote red and coyote orange.
The fire is real and the insides of coyotes are real.

The things that happen are happening
whether coyotes like it or not.

The trees are crashing down and crushing coyotes
and gopher snakes and porcupines.
All the bushes are crushed and set on fire
and all the berries and leaves
and all the thorns of bushes are crushed.

The insides of coyotes are happy.
The insides of coyotes have been shut up
in the dark for so long, held in the tight
muscle of the animal, constricted, commanded.

This coyote freedom is delicious.
The insides snake across the woodland floor,
ooze and belch bubbles in the hot air,
expose themselves to the kiss of the world.

This poem is published in Firebird, as are all the ones I’ve shared on Substack this past year.

Blessings to all coyotes, dead and alive, and to all of us trying to honour animals in whatever ways we can. As Barry Lopez said, “You never know, they may have been like seers in a parallel culture.” Indeed.

Being a human animal

I would say that I’m experiencing one of the strangest and longest periods of strangeness in my life right now. I’m trying to write about it in my paid subscriber posts, but it’s almost impossible to write about: it’s like trying to write about God – both strangeness and God are so familiar that they’re unfamiliar, so close to the bone that the flesh can’t see it. Strangeness and God are both innate to humans, I think. If you’d like to travel with me, to enquire with me, please do consider subscribing.

One aspect of the strangeness is the inability and disinclination to read or write (these Substacks are it) and so I’m not recommending other Substacks here or celebrating other writers at the moment. This has been going on for more than a year now and it has nothing to do with writer’s block. I’m experiencing a kind of intellectual blindness. At least, that’s how it (approximately) feels.

Thank you for being here and blessings to you all in these dark times.

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This is one of my favourite poems from my Firebird collection. I love it because it moves me into new territory every time I read it. It deals me a blow – small, ignorant pilgrim poet! – that extinguishes me and lights me up at the same time. I’m writer and coyote, reader and coyote from beginning to end.

I was on a podcast recently, and one of the questions was about ‘writing in the voice of the animal’. The interviewer – also a poet – was adamant that the voice of the coyotes was, ultimately, my voice. But it’s not that simple. I don’t think a poet’s job is to speak for the animals, but to listen for the space where the animal’s voice merges with the poet’s sensibility. In this way, a whole new level of communication becomes possible; the emergence of a co-voice, if you like.

This emergence takes place in a shamanic field, where the animal is the messenger and the poet the receptor. It is not a ‘real’ field in the Western, materialist sense, but it is nonetheless profoundly real on every other level of existence. I experience this field as more real than the ‘real’, and perhaps that’s why the coyotes are happy to message me? I don’t doubt their spirits’ existence, the energetic field of their voices, dead or alive. I don’t need to empirically prove their existence or rationally make sense of the field. I’ll never do this – it’s not what I’m here for.

What am I here for? To gaze upon Meinrad’s image this morning for the umpteenth time, to recognise there the wild love she embodied: the ochre of not-knowing, the black earth of humility, and the scarlet of knowing she must live her one, precious life inside the great flame.

Burning Coyotes

We let out the last air of us.

Above the burning hot scarlet we’re running,
sloping between night clouds,
leaving behind our bodies as offerings.

We don’t know what we’re doing
without paws, heads, muzzles or legs.

We leave as though there’s nothing
we need to take leave of.

We become seamless
in the way blood is seamless.

Nobody hears our souls lifting up,
their robust silence,
the way they float and rest,

           float and rest

like brave lilies on an open pond,

                                                               up and out

beyond anything like life,
deep into mountains that are not mountains,
to a sandhill that is not a sandhill
in the middle of which is a red bridge that is not a bridge.

We cross the red bridge or the bridge crosses us
        and,           like strange birds in a new cosmos,
we pass over, giving back whatever gifts we have.

It is extravagantly dark here, until it is light.

Firebird (Shearsman, 2024) is available here.

I’ve waited a long time for kittens. At least, it feels like a long time to me – I’ve always lived alongside animals, and in 2024 we lost our old dog and our old cat. They were 18 and 19 years old respectively. We knew each other well.

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Artemis is here in the throat of the fire and in the auras of the coyotes. She burns with love for the wild animals, and somehow she holds them in her goddess embrace. It’s as though the Bosque woods of Albuquerque, New Mexico (where this actual fire took place in 2004) were a wild Athenian temple. I like the way Craighead transcribes one world into another like this, how she refuses to be faithful to one culture alone, to be monocultural. Perhaps this, too, is one of art’s greatest gifts?

This poem, written in response to Meinrad’s image, centres on ‘a single, everyday word’, as nod to the simple complexity of death. What word captures this for you?

Artemis With Burning Coyotes

On the first day, there’s a volcano.
Lava enters the skin of the neck,
slips open the trachea, the jugular vein.

On the second day, there’s longing,
the kind that turns men into coyotes
and coyotes into dead coyotes.

On the third day, there’s the mouth
of the goddess champing on fire.

The mouth has come a long way down the ages
to arrive here with a full set of teeth
and a tongue that lashes the world
with a single, everyday word.

What word?

The mouth devours everything.
Its lips begin and end in flames.
It gnaws, it gnashes
and it tongues the fire’s heart.

What word?

This poem is from my third collection, Firebird (Shearsman, 2024), and was featured in the latest book, themed around bodies.

Just then, a little bird landed beside the heart, a bird of bright, glistening greens and blues, with a tail that splayed out like a tiny ocean wave. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ the little bird said, leaning in towards the heart and giving it an inquisitive peck. The heart remained silent and sluggish, stuck in its rocky place, immoveable. ‘You’re a laugh a minute,’ the little bird said, ‘what on earth’s the matter?’ But the melancholy heart didn’t answer and even though the little bird hopped and fanned its tail and sang a song, nothing could implore the melancholy heart to respond.

Meanwhile, the world groaned with its new burden of horror – the ransacking, the rape and the worst kinds of atrocities taking place in every country, in every town, in every body. The world was heavier than it had ever been, and every now and then, it choked on the black clouds of toxic smoke and bomb-blasts. What a terrible state the world was in!

‘If I tell you a story, will you at least turn to face me?’ the little bird asked the heart, ‘will you at least listen?’

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I like this analogy of thinking as a kind of charcoal drawing. It honours the mind’s playfulness and recognises the mind’s structures, patterns, denseness and agility. When the lines get too rigid, I can blend them, especially if someone leans over and takes my hand.

Of course, I’m not here to explain anything, because the coyotes do the explaining for me. They always have. I imagine they did a lot of explaining for Meinrad Craighead, too, someone who celebrated animals as much as I do; as much as many of us do. It’s true, though, that coyotes have never much bothered with the kind of explaining we humans bother with. To them, more often than not, human explaining is the mind’s self-immolating fire.

Look at this wonderful charcoal drawing of Meinrad’s! She called it ‘Coyotes Pass A Burning Tree’, and there are indeed three coyotes passing with very big tails indeed, so big that the coyotes themselves must be ginormous. The tree in the background is small by comparison, a slender birch perhaps. The fire is hot and spitting red in all directions, but the coyotes’ tails are very sure of themselves nonetheless. They are so sure of themselves that they understand pain from beginning to end; they understand the tree’s pain and the collective pain of the Bosque woods (please see previous posts for context). Being sure of oneself is a great gift to the world, isn’t it, just as long as it’s not the kind of sureness that denies death, failure, weakness and loss.

I don’t know about you, but I love the way Meinrad captures so much in such a simple image. When I look at her work, I experience a flood of love in my body, an appreciation for her work. I sometimes experience this with other works of art, too, and it’s a good reminder that artistry of all disciplines can be a quiet gesture of love.

Coyotes Pass a Burning Tree

The forest lost its mind at first light.

We ran to find it
before it was too late,

but the forest was running too
and nothing can outrun
a running forest.

Had it stuffed its mind
inside the burnt hollow of a tree?

Had it hidden it
in the rubble of a shattered boulder?

Had it outsmarted us all
by burying it in ash?

We sighed
our last sighs,

and just before it was too late,
one of us gave up her mind

to the forest
in a quiet gesture of love.

is also a quiet gesture of love and I want to celebrate it today. The people gathered around its fires also praise and honour animals and all of nature. The project has been and continues to be a beacon for humans who wish to carry the fire for future generations – of flora & fauna, including humans. If you haven’t come across the project before, I highly recommend heading over there and immersing yourself. It’s been a haven for me for many years (I worked as Dark Mountain’s poetry editor in the 2010s and continue to publish poems in its beautiful, hardback books – themselves quiet gestures). Its 2009 manifesto gives a brief summary of its core values:

Together, we are walking away from the stories our societies like to tell themselves, the stories that prevent us seeing clearly the extent of the ecological, social and cultural unravelling that is now underway. We are making art that doesn’t take the centrality of humans for granted. We are tracing the deep cultural roots of the mess the world is in. And we are looking for other stories, ones that can help us make sense of a time of disruption and uncertainty.

What stories we tell and what stories we believe in, make up the charcoal drawings of our minds, and in turn, anticipate the gestures we make in the world.

The poem, ‘Coyotes Pass A Burning Tree’ comes from my 2024 collection, Firebird, published by Shearsman and available here.

I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led - make of that what you will.

Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

I’ve tried reading the Bible – cover to cover – umpteen times in my life. In my 40s, I decided I should try harder, because really, if I was calling myself a Christian, shouldn’t I be well-versed in the scriptures? I set aside time each morning to read a chapter, or a few verses. I’d stick at it for a while and then desist. Weeks and months would pass, before I’d force myself to begin again. Even though I’ve forgotten most of the details by now, I must have read Genesis a dozen times. I can’t help but guffaw a little at myself for that – what a dear, good student, going back to the beginning again and again, determined to stay the course this time. But nothing ever goes quite to plan, does it? I found the Psalms. I found the Song of Solomon and I found, at various times, the Gospels, but I’ve forgotten almost all of it now. It took a few years of repeatedly forcing myself to read the Bible, before it dawned on me – thank God! – that this is not my job, not my calling. Even more than that, I’m not meant to engage with the Bible in this lifetime, at least not in a scholarly way. In fact, I’m not meant to know anything much at all.

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This is an ekphrastic poem about coyotes trying to escape the fire of the Bosque woods, which surrounded the home of visual artist, Meinrad Craighead. If you’ve been reading my occasional posts here, you’ll know that this is one in a series of ekphrastic poems, published in my most recent collection, Firebird (Shearsman, 2024).

It’s funny how this poem is so pertinent to our times. I wrote it back in 2022 or 2023 – I can’t remember exactly – and it was pertinent then, too, of course. We are living in the fiery decades. Or maybe it’s the fiery century. In any case, everything everywhere is being burnt down. Fire is raging all around us and, like the coyotes, we want to escape it, to find a way out, to survive. Of course we do – life is so utterly delicious, painful and wild! Most of us aren’t so keen on the pain bit, but sometimes it dawns on this Em Strang person that pain is a kind of fire, a little (or big) cauterisation that enables a wound to heal. Whoosh!

This poem is a celebration of the animal body and the energy that enlivens it. It’s a nod to the impermanence of flesh and the delightful embodied yes of the flesh. I like to imagine the coyotes’ muscles with a life of their own; just as I like to ponder the inner workings of my own strange body. What messages are being conveyed, muscle to muscle? What fire is in the language of our meat?

Perhaps guffawing is good for us in today’s world? Today, on Easter Friday, I will guffaw at the crosses we’re all nailing ourselves to. Not because I don’t feel grief – I do – but because it reminds me not to get lost inside the darkness forever; it acts as a kind of premonition of the light. In the end, I think Jesus understood this. I think coyotes understand it, too.

Wild Dogs Fleeing

Coyote flesh lives a guffawing life 
from the first myocytes
to the muscle’s last stretch.

It guffaws in the least likely places – 
the hot pits of coyote legs,
in the ruff and the rump.

If you listen with the right kind of ears, 
you can hear the waggish chuckle. 
Even as it pounds with blood,

hot and straining,
the flesh is droll, 
each ligament raucous with laughter.

It knows something we don’t.
It must know something
we’ve neither thought nor dreamt.

One muscle jokes with another muscle
and together they circumnavigate the world 
of the burning woods

beneath the hot pelt of the wild dogs. 
Miraculous flesh!
Wise, thirsty, desperate flesh!

Some bright spark asks what’s so funny 
and the flesh says, “This!”

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