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I’m afraid I must recuse myself from interpreting this one the way you intended because it has gotten into my head that it’s about my brother, so everything I get from it is tainted with those memories I harbor of him. It is painfully cathartic. The poem is so unpredictable from line to line that it's odd to see it here on metrical (but I'm not the one to judge the metricality of this). Metrically, it is a wild horse of a poem to my ear.
Thoughts
The combination of punctuation and wording/phrasing in the opening lines was hard for me to parse (I’m still not sure I get what’s going on to begin the poem. Has he set fire to the ragweed and wildflowers which just so happen to be growing up(?) the woodpile and inadvertently sets fire to the entire woodpile? I’m being dense, maybe…
This line gives me brain freeze:
What was not there is not what eludes,
And then it is followed by the compounding, repeating negative “no” to end the poem. It hits me like hammer blows and I’m left with nothing but “alive”.
The final line is stupefying. I hear in its tone a faint hint of Yeats' “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? I don’t know why.I]
But it doesn't matter. The poem latched on to my imagination and became a vignette of my brother’s life. I’ve taken every line to be about him. It is astonishing how combustible poetry can be when it finds its way into the memory and imagination.
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