i.

This hearth heals with warmth what its light
burns, consoles without want for reward in return
for the service those whose burdens its torch
bears without warning, absorbs concerns it endures without
remorse or recourse to bitterness, abhors prejudice, practices
patience the way an ache does once tended
to with a kiss’s poultice, turning over in
his urn the ashes of a clockmaker trapped
in timelessness, doctors fate’s fading clauses to grandfather
in his suffering’s missed moments of life’s unanticipated
fulfillment of forgotten promises, the silent physician who
stands watch over its glow’s broken course, fingers
of shadow splinter in their prodding forks to
devour as dusk does a sun set on
being beheld instead of swallowed, pilfers its fire’s
lingering worth, turns on its gold, a wealth
of sweat impoverishes heat with its own translucent
need to be seen, assertions of work’s exertion
perform outwardly inward storms of commotion this book’s

                    ii.

deformed words never rehearsed, flames return to the
æther of another winter the theories of another
anonymous speaker, an author immortalized phœnix-like here where
nothing is heard, nothing except for the sighing
of an hour unwinding in its idling every
memory of an observer the inexhaustible splendour of
this many-mouthed monument has no time for, chimney-ribbing
lips of brick reveal above what no one
is around below to feel, the weight of
smoke making of this home’s lone fireplace a
multifaceted joke, facetious enough to conceal its gut’s
furtive motive, quickening dead air with tragedy, before
it goes out, whatever his diary noted this
nameless horary notary wanted to be left unspoke,
in honour not of his wishes but how
it cleanses, banishes distress lived or imagined, look
on these sparse pages spared incineration by this
furnace and seek no meaning other than an
author’s appreciation for being voiceless among the herd.