Gene Fowler		THE JUG OF WINE The art is the art of starting fires. In a less stripped out landscape pile up leaves and twigs into little harvest stacks twisted into fibrous toughness, find a flint rock and an iron rock, and find the spark and place it where fire waits; or make a twine bow, a gut bow, and spin a stick til there's smoke and where the smoke is, fire. But here, where it's asphalt and cement, door- ways from the wind, and never through the door, only up against it, the lore of fire's different. Do it with your own flesh. Do it with a jug of cheap red. Catch it on the bough of wrist - big jug, that's the dream, gallon, hundred gallon, cauldron, catch it on the wrist and bend it like a swan's throat and find the fire riding down the throat, burning out the deep cold, to land clear to the bottom of the belly and bounce back up through all the cold flesh, that's fire, the leap and dance, the fires - and the slow fire following that tree-top rush of fire as you hunch in toward your own fire pit and burn the sugar through the night while winds pass over and dreams explode like ember-sparks and flare into visions of worlds to be built - and fallen back, eyelids covering con- flagrations, quietly chant, in husk voice, the fire chant: "Oh, shit, "Jes-us, shit, "oh, shit . . . "shit . . ." And let the yellowed sunset go ruby in the sinking puddle in that bent toward you jug. ---------------------------------- previously published in the 1982 book "Return of the Shaman" from A.D. Winan's Second Coming Press