Fire season and we walk out of the Lensic
into haze, each street light ringed
like van Gogh or when I first wore
contact lenses. All the glare of air
kept me from vision.
Fire season waiting for monsoon
my husband drives into the mountains
with a friend and her daughter, daughter of
the woman I saw in the ground, can’t talk about it
but after these weeks of smoke
rest in peace has a different ring to it.
My brother’s heart in fire season,
a word I never spelled before, a stent,
like when we used to go camping in a tent,
you and I in the Maroon Bells
reading while it rained, an orange
plastic tube tent, and we had forty years
ahead, go figure, and how
would we know. Yesterday you asked
“How come you get to do that in poetry?”
It’s the unconscious, I reply, a place
more worthy than I am myself. The underbrush,
the coming in from under said Keroauc,
the underworld. Can the unconscious
fall from above, like grace and angels,
or is it what Lorca meant? Duende, duende
duende in the afternoon.
How I feel about ash on the car
after it is washed, shiny, shiny
Fire season, this too shall, this too
shall, pass and ash have something in common.
How come you get to burn, fire?
How come no one can write a pre-
drought poem anymore?
Responses to “Weekly Poetry: Drought”