after Jane Hirshfield's poem "Burlap Sack," 
		taped to an office wall in San Francisco

A person is full of sorrow    says the poem    is the sack 
	and not its sorrowful stones   
The page trembles in the brisk worker’s wake    Whoop whoop
	whoopee 

cry the sirens on Market St.   And I am packing stones    
	not quite believing 
in emergency    a fugitive called home by rumblings 
	of a distant storm   

Over the Sierra and Rockies beyond the black sunflower fields    
	Tennessee lingers 
under a sucked-out sky    My country crawls beneath my seat    
	only half a day’s flight 

but I left candles burning years ago and now    conflagration     
	Where the Mississippi
and Ohio merge I know the scene by heart:    tires    tree trunks    
	a half-buried drum

on the barren bank    the river’s awful insides coughed up 
	to the shallows 
to take root again    Now I’m looking down into that big muddy maw    
	combing the rubble

I pearl around    the impossible seeds    the intricate mess-
	ages of sparrows 
padding on wishbones toward    then away    from the deep    
	I fly to the candle    

absurd bird    dragging my hoses    dipping my canisters 
	into the current    
carrying buckets        pitiful buckets        
	to the flames