Old Wooden Matches

Old Wooden Matches

Now you have to push it all –

Just as you loved to push the piled live hedge-boughs –

Into a gathering blaze

And as you loved to linger late into the twilight,

Coaxing the last knuckle embers,

Now you have to stay

Right on, into total darkness

                                                Now you have to push

                                                Ted Hughes

Fire hides inside the cap

of a match

stick, bides its time for

the glidestrike or

quickflitstrike

against the thin clapper

all boxes

of matches are packaged

with.  It must’ve been

on that shelf a hundred hundred

weeks, and I’ve lately
come to

the custom of Bics or Zippos, my thumb

                (numb still

                a year on shutting it in

                the car door – I’d wanted

                to see that weeping beech

                beneath the new snow . . .

thumb I run down

the teeny rigid wheel

to wake up the flint
and fuel

to pull the nigh dry wad

of cotton off to light the tongue . . .

We say: we’ve come all this way

holy ghosts.  Yesterday, in the rain

I made pictures of the face

of a saint and the lines

like trenches from his eyes, his cheeks,

a contrail streak on a bleak bleak day.

We say: ok ok the stone mason maybe

had great faith

or faith enough that even

a rough cut of a sinner could

walk up and watch the water

fall down marble

and cough his own intention out of

a lung going to smoke

in that very moment, having been lit,

a candle all his life.

There’s really little left, enough

perhaps that happening

to turn on his good hip

the sinner doesn’t tip and can still give

a nonchalant toss in the hardening water:

he makes it seem easy,

the slip into his pants pocket

for a row of wooden soldiers,

matches, on second inspection,
in zipped plastic,

and makes them lay precisely 

where the plinth meet the walking stick and toe

of the monument, all of them and each

(seeing beneath the lit lens on his workbench)

men he’s known, their names, and with the tip

of a hot pin, a profile 

of their face.