Arriving Home Late One Night

     by David Hubbard

It is sadly beautiful

To watch a house on fire

The timbers crashing and crackling

Black and orange,

The colors of catastrophic burn

Collapsing memories,

Collapsing hallways and bedrooms,

Where the threat of divorce

Once hushed the children

To a perfect stillness.

Let no one sift photographs

From the smoky ash;

Let no one pull a blackened

Bed coil from the coals.

Satisfy yourselves with a few patches

Of yellow wallpaper, singed and floating

On thermals of heated air,

The small remains of that one happy breakfast,

That Christmas night under shared blankets,

The summer of quiet love and lemonade,

Those few moments when no one

Bent spark to tinder.

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David Hubbard is a writer/poet living in Carlsbad, California, located about thirty-five miles north of San Diego, where he works as an environmental law attorney. He published some poems in the late 1990s, stopped writing for about fifteen years to pursue a law career, and recently started up again. Last year, he had a story published in the May issue of Marginalia and has a poem forthcoming in Gargoyle Magazine.

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© 2011 David Hubbard