The upturned milk crate next to the convenience

store’s door casts a hue slightly less

flame-like than the near tiger lilies

reaching over the century bricks that constitute

 

the street, whose orange also pales

moderately to those perennials waving

above the pavement trodden by many feet

of the living and the dead, a surface for stepping,

 

as the plastic box is for sitting by one

or another needing separation from the concrete

and its heat, the latticework non-biodegradable

so a seat for eternity, of inverted invention,

 

no need for a blaze of cubic permanence, a block

of simulated fire, the burn gladly left to the growing

embers that will return to wave over hard rock,

in sun and shadow, unbidden year after fertile year