EXPERTS HOPE TO BLOW OUT OIL FIRE ON TUESDAY

               —The Marshall Evening Chronicle, 
February 26, 1962

by Greg Rappeleye

We park in the dead corn (at this point, why not?)
along a county road the name of which I didn’t 
catch as high-beams washed across its sign.
A quarter-mile off, a vast pillar of flame gnaws 
the winter sky (leaky valve; a bad-luck rasp of match
to striker). Mam says I must witness this night, 
ought know the roar of it, must feel the blistering heat, 
before Red Adair, creeping behind an asbestos shield,
can poke a jar of nitro at the scorchy well-head. 
Beyond the dead stalks, the whirling lights 
of fire trucks stutter against bulldozers, 
the pickups, the arcing waters—reddening 
the great clouds of steam, washing ochre against 
the gravel heap, red across the warped square 
of the pipe deck and the twisted iron rig, 
making it difficult in the other-darkness, 
hard against this raging column, in the high-
stink of crude and sulphur, in a sudden flare 
of withering heat across boundary snow, 
to make many judgments, to know a line of fault.
Why are we here?  To love and serve the Lord,
Mam says. She skirls the dial across the ionosphere 
and snags a border-blast of Mexican radio—all the way 
north from Oaxaca—voices we listen to 
on late-night drives because they sell “don’t worry 
powders,” “hatchable ducklings by mail,” 
and “autographed photos of J. Christ of biblical fame.”

Greg Rappleye’s poems have previously appeared in POETRY, The Southern Review,  The North American Review, Arts & Letters, Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review,  Water-Stone Review, and many other journals. Barley Child, his fifth poetry collection, is currently looking for a clever publisher.