With -34°C outside
I sit in here by the hearth,
silent, leaning forward
by newly flared birchwood from the farm’s forests;
the good handling of radiant heat
around my tough-tag-trousered legs
and my polar-socked feet, stretched out;
the house’s two floors constantly measured
and examined
by Silver & Cesi; the cat siblings,
the miraculous

The fire in the stove; a measure of solar energy,
transported through breathless space,
nurtured in decades of birch-tree growth,
released under controlled conditions
in the stove in the great room
on the ground floor up on Noret;
the fire, in its hearth-body, murmuring to me
in my tired hearing,
flickering, clicking, crackling
its aphorisms on fire & warmth
& Human survival
in cold & starlight;
my eyes resting in the dance of the flames,
my ears groping in the fire
over the stage of the wood-burning stove;
the fire’s Bachelardian character
forging time & thought
as I lift Hans Ruin's The Ambiguous Human
and let myself be survived in fire & dream,
the cold space reaching all the way down
around the house on the hill tonight,
so convincingly eternally void