Stephen Kuusisto

Finnish rural life, ca. 1910 Fires, always fires after midnight, the sun depending in the purple birches and gleaming like a copper kettle. By the solstice they’d burned everything, the bad-luck sleigh, a twisted rocker, things “possessed” and not-quite-right. The bonfire coils and lurches, big as a house, and then it settles. The dancers come, dressed like rainbows (if rainbows could be spun), and linking hands they turn to the melancholy fiddles. A red bird spreads its wings now and in the darker days to come.