Poetry
Part III

Gary Fincke

THE DOORS OF HELL

       for the thirty-fifth year of the Centralia mine fire

Tonight

The hot spots are stars
which drift far from where
the earth once opened,
allowing a boy
to slide toward fire.
The roots which saved him
are a tourist site.
The town's moved have left
their lots for walking,
their houses landfill.

The Aeneas Tour

The priests of Avernus descended to Hell.
Trip after trip, black-clad and cowled, they guided
The paying by torchlight to the underground
River which ran from the volcano's hot springs.
They counted on the length and depth of a cave
Constructed for the Oracle of the Dead;
They relied on awe and drugs when they halted
Where the steam clouds roiled the tunnel hazy.
The pilgrims believed they'd reached the River Styx,
The priests chanting under the wavering lamps.
Later, after his tour, Virgil remembered
The stream's passage to fog, the hooded boatman,
Though he writes nothing about how many years
It took to build Hell's tunnel three hundred yards
Through rock, how perfectly the earliest priests
Predicted the dreaded water. And what of
The priests who astonished him, those who played
The spirits of the dead, becoming the friends
And relatives of pilgrims? What faith they had,
Repeating the tours, accepting the money
While Hades lay elsewhere. There was vocation,
Nothing in their downslope promoting hope, not
For the priest who rowed the boat, the monk who wailed
Laments until they reascended to sit
Across from each other through silent suppers.

The DOH Club

All winter my mother showed me hell,
Opening the furnace, shoveling
The coal while my father slept toward
The making of pasteries and pies.
"The devil's work," she said, tossing in
The daily trash, "and you'll roast in it
Unless you're good," and I believed her
Because every paper I covered
With crayoned pictures curled and went black.
Nothing of me lasted as long as bread.

The snow piled up one weekend until
Everyone walked again, heads tilted
Into the wind. On steep Gibson Hill
A boy on a sled surprised a truck
And was split like crust. I stayed inside
And dreamed my skin would tear, letting loose
My soul. My room above the furnace
Grew horns; my spirit was coal. At last,
In North Korea, somebody else
We knew was opened as easily
As a dinner roll. All afternoon
Our radio said his name, the tubes
In the back glowing like the letters
On my father's bakery sign.

It was seven blocks to where the mill
Made its hell renovations, the hills
Which flared, then faded, ready to be
Hauled to the waste pits. The Doors of Hell,
According to my aunt, were downstairs,
One block from that furnace. At dusk, men
I didn't know filled the DOH,
Men who thought they would leave by midnight,
Men who opened that downstairs door and
Were replaced in the rented doubles
Running to the railroads behind the mill.
And the women said nothing about
Their secret sense of passage, clearing
Their throats for the lost languages of
Eastern Europe, spitting sooted phlegm,
Beginning the stories which ended
In the guttural names for fire.

Subsidence, Mine Fire, the Tomb of Eve

In the Encyclopedia Britannica,
For three editions, paragraphs
About the Salem Church Dam, height
And length, the power and purpose
Of the never-constructed, some
Fact-checker believing it built,
That a reservoir rose behind it.
Like hell ready for the day of moving.
Like the huge hole which opened
Outside my classroom window, stopped
Three feet short of the brick-work wall.
Coal mine, certainly. Underground fire.
But for all I knew, the sudden suck
Of collapse would widen to ribbons
And sawhorses, students and teachers
And the first crush from the neighborhood
Pressed near the great vandalism of chance.
I told myself to turn away before
The windowsill leaned out and down,
That wall tumbling like a headstone,
The earth swallowing in its ancient way,
Forecasting like the Mother of Mankind,
Who spoke, in Jedda, for thirty years
From the tomb of Eve. She took questions
Through a slim shaft to the ancient dead,
So far underground, so many coins fed
By foreign pilgrims, she listened
For tone and accent to prepare
The exact change of an answer to send
Up the pneumatic tube for hope.
And there were those who trembled with lust,
Those who offered themselves to her, what
They were willing to do or have done,
Buying queries of blood and semen.
There were those who tunneled until
She used the backdoor to escape
From the warren of secret wants.
And how long should I walk, this evening,
Where traffic is banned? What questions, years
After that school collapsed, should I shout
Through this highway split, finally, from
That mine fire's arrival? What prophecies
Might I hear, following the fire's
Old fissures through the cemetery,
Laying my hands to the smoldering earth
Near the church where the sinkholes plummet
To seams burned back to simmering?
Who answers for the future?
In the neighboring field rise rusted rows
Of vents, and no smoke escapes from any,
Moved on, the world beneath them ash.

Fincke home page

Poetry, Part I

Poetry, Part II