Fire Poem by Theresa Haffner

11: 00 a.m. no money. only three pennies which is enough to cast the ‘i ching’ oracle but not enough to pay the parking meter.

a week now since the fire. the smell of smoke gradually clearing out from the halls of this cheap hotel where we live.

there are bits and pieces of copper and brass lying around the floor of the hotel room. jewelry parts. no complete articles, just the metal wires and brackets of, say, a bead necklace after the beads have vaporized. or melted into unrecognizable black ‘shish-ka-bobs’ on their metal spits.

these are steve’s things. all that could be salvaged after his room was destroyed by fire. they remind him of terrell—his lover who died.

they are being stored with me because my room wasn’t destroyed. he is staying with friends until he can relocate.

this is all he has now. this and the singed pages of a few of his magick books—heavily water damaged.

he will make something out of these pieces. maybe not jewelry, but something that for him at least has magickal power.

not to argue with magick, for magick is as magick does. but I am not attracted to jewelry for magickal purposes.

the only way a piece of jewelry—or metal or stone for that matter—will hold magickal power for me is if it’s worth a lot of money.

or at least has a lot of weight, something substantial with some size to it. (unless it belonged to a very special person.)

but it’s the idea behind the object—not the object itself—which has power. this is the whole concept of magick.

leave these pieces for steve. humble smoke scarred remnants of copper and brass.

because fire has a power that is neither metaphysical or conceptual.

fire is singular and absolute.


11: 30 a.m. life goes on. have to take these other belongings left by andre and pam over to their new hotel room where they had to move because firemen chopped a hole in their ceiling.

the morning sun is bright and warm. i am ducking the traffic cop to avoid getting a parking ticket, and the stark reality of razed walls and billowing smoke, the level headed thinking of the management that evacuated all the inhabitants, and the prompt response of the fire department that limited the damage to only two rooms of the antiquated hotel—seems like a distant memory.

andre and pam will be all right once they get a pay check.

till then people will give them a break so they can get by.

steve has his mysticism to console him. not only his teachings, but also others who study the principles of higher consciousness and seek to live a more spiritualized existence. who will give him the help that he needs for starting over, so that if he has nothing now, it will not always be so.

funny how those who lead the life of the spirit are subject to the same foibles, jealousies, personal conflicts, and isolation,

unforeseeable natural disasters and acts of god

as those who do not.

the same fate befalls them both.

damn these cheap hotels. we were lucky the whole thing didn’t go up like a tinder box.

you can’t argue with fire.

-12/15/99