Outside: -34°C.
Inside: the leaning body
before the hearth

Birch from ancestral forests
opens its stored sun.
Heat takes my legs in hand,
my feet in polar wool extend
toward flame

The house is paced,
sounded,
claimed
by two silver presences –
siblings, miraculous,
measuring what lives

Fire:
solar matter carried through mute space,
grown slow in white trunks,
now loosed –
disciplined, contained –
in the heart of the room,
on the hill

It murmurs.
Clicks.
Crackles
its brief laws
of warmth,
of survival
under stars

My eyes enter the dance.
My ears lose themselves
on the stove’s small stage

Fire thinks.
Time is forged

I lift The Ambiguous Human
and am carried –
not reading,
but being survived
by flame and dream,

while cold space presses close,
circling the house,
persuasive,
eternally void