Field Notes on Fire
In Berlin a dying
man’s photo is plastered
on cigarette canisters –
he’s in a fetal position, pale
a spring chicken without
feathers – they go on,
we go on, smoking
outside supermarkets,
inside bars when
it’s cold and late into
the winter and all
breath becomes smog –
It is not the smushed tobacco
packed with spit, seering the soft
valley of skin
between two fingers –
It is always the beginning
or the aftermath, never
the middle, (blind to
those phantom flames) –
Terracotta soot, talcum
dusting the bones of
Malibu forests and beachwood –
bonfires with no permits –
Not the blaze I wish
to touch, glowing
on the gas stove, heat
drubbing just before
the flesh –
Or the few candles
pulsing, though
not enough
to make a shrine –
But enough to see
the faces of my
family burned out and
adrift among pastoral images, glazed
with pastel television hues –
The fires, vertigo
brought on by ash
pruning, ruining
these trunks, dried
into stalks of licorice like
Madagascar vanilla beans
congregating into lines of midnight –
They should keep me from
California and desert plains,
the cracking dirt
like flower veins, will
my great grandchildren
see the light of day?
Or will these possibilities
be buried (no cremated)
under another luster,
luring in those eyes
that wander into
another ball of –
Fire is droopy, wet and hard
hungry, snapping
down white, hot oaks
as dawn leaks
at the fracture, letting
their colors take boats
and mares, mothers
and goats –
A pile up on
the 405, the vessels
of the road and heart
suffocate, annihilate
one another, going
nowhere, inoperable
and hooked to an illness –
We bring it
get well soon
balloons –
Birds plummeting
through Phos-Chek –
A cigarette
dropped on chaff hears
autumn humming
summer’s death metal.