PA Valley Fire Sky by Robert Cain Sometimes the sky would turn the color of blood and through the valley would bang the sounds of iron smelting pots cooling down. My most vivid memory is Fall when after the wild cacophony of trees the sky would glow alizarin crimson to Indian red and melt from mauve back into a chilly black speckled with stars. Of course there were smells of sulfur acrid hot be-dragoned smells which grabbed one by the nose and held one prisoner. Why prisoner? Could it be that even after all these years I can never get that burning from my soul? Could it be that even now the smell of leaves bursting into flames and floating like lace tracers in the gray smoke make me watch how high they will go? . . . Make me wish they would not stop or fade or die the way things do. And what a sky there was when clouds moved in from out of state and took up residency only three or four feet above our heads. You see, on the hillside where the wind gathered smells it also gathered soft silent clouds that hid the moon and the children. In their residency, they never stayed long enough to appreciate the silence Winter brought. Always moving on, the massive canopy would wave like sails being set like sheets on clotheslines beckoning us to tell the world where we would want to go. What a sky, when in the throws of sulfur, it turns in on itself a bubbling cauldron churning out a memory in one as hard as any steel. Its structures reminders of solid work and pays that went for that house on the hill and the four kids they raised to witness the grand displays. Not prisoner as much as dreamer the bombs bursting in air it's the end of the world we hear when from the mouths of babes comes such wise utterances. Run. Run. Ollie Ollie in come free! Yet, when they arrive cheeks burned by the icy cold and boot buckles so covered with ice they needed to be chipped away, they could never escape that vision of the sky. |