Centralia

In candle-lit flickering, you trace
rib’s slope. Your bed
of dark strata, each seam a deeper
face. Not far from here, a town
built on a mine caught fire
fifty years ago and is still
burning. Beneath the overburden
of those other lives—friable surface
where residents of small hope
and coal smoke make peanut butter
sandwiches or bicker, or sing
their coal-tinged lullabies—we move
in upcast shadow. Lampless
and luminous, breath crumbles again
in the smoldering, the bitumen,
the glittering ore body.