Summer Lightning

In the morning while it's still cool
we hose down the yard, watch a red sun
crest the ridge, haloed in wildfire smoke
that drifted 200 miles and stalled
here against the mountains.

A house fly is walking across the table,
six tiny feet leaving tracks in the yogurt.
One cat has already eaten a hummingbird.
If you think about joy long enough,
maybe death will make sense:

a matter of balance. The deer caught
in that fire outside Redding, the rabbits
and bear cubs, king snakes, and you know
when 30 boats melt at anchor in Whiskeytown,
fish in that lake have perished.

Displaced blue herons, mergansers.
I am not asking forgiveness
for the hummingbird. I plant the flowers
and water them — who else would come
for their nectar? And what cat wouldn't leap

at the chance? In this world there is order
wherever you look: cause, effect, logic,
consequence. A dry winter, and a car backfire
or summer lightning ignites just one branch,
which bends in the wind the flames create

to brush another. A few hours later
it's 45 square miles and uncontained.
The fire jumps the river after supper
headed downtown and cars crawl away
from their homes in a dark lit by headlights

and flung sparks, chased by the crackle
and gathering roar, song of a small city burning.

Particulate Matter

If all you counted were tires on the cars left in driveways and stranded beside the roads.
Melted dashboards and tail lights, oil pans, window glass, seat belt clasps.
The propane tanks in everyone's yards, though we didn't hear them explode.

R-13 insulation. Paint, inside and out. The liquor store's plastic letters in puddled
colors below their charred sign. Each man-made sole of every shoe in all those closets.
The laundromat's washers' round metal doors.

But then Arco, Safeway, Walgreens, the library—everything they contained.
How many miles of electrical wire and PVC pipe swirling into the once-blue sky:
how many linoleum acres? Not to mention the valley oaks, the ponderosas, all the wild

hearts and all the tame, their bark and leaves and hooves and hair and bones, their final
cries, and our neighbors: so many particular, precious, irreplaceable lives that despite
ourselves we're inhaling.

Singing Canyon Sonnet

I have to say something about the blue grasses by the side of the road,
the red rock rising behind them, a lacy kind of scrub juniper,
yellow-green in afternoon light, dotted here and there up the broken slope

and walls scraped sheer, the red striated with bars of gold and brown.
I have to tell how two greasy ravens startled from their perch
made a raucous noise in the slot canyon. Their cries bounced upward

magnified by a hundred where I had just been singing Amazing Grace
and they had not stirred, the only hymn whose verses I reliably remember.
My boots raised puffs of fine red dust behind me walking back to the car.

I should mention that the aspen leaves were thumbnail-sized and vivid,
that anvil clouds quickly overtook the sun, that before I saw those thirty-seven
white-tailed deer I was feeling unbearably lonely and I might as well confess

how acutely I miss the man I left at home even though I drove
two thousand miles away from him to figure out which one of us to love.

Hunter's Moon

Mid-December, dusk, and the sky
slips down the rungs of its blue ladder
into indigo. A late-quarter moon hangs
in the air above the ridge like a broken plate
and shines on us all, on the new deputy
almost asleep in his four-by-four,
lulled by the crackling song of the dispatcher,
on the bartender, slowly wiping a glass
and racking it, one eye checking the game.
It shines down on the fox’s red and grey life,
as he stills, a shadow beside someone’s gate,
listening to winter. Its pale gaze caresses
the lovers, curled together under a quilt,
dreaming alone, and shines on the scattered
ashes of terrible fires, on the owl’s black flight,
on the whelks, on the murmuring kelp,
on the whale that washed up six weeks ago
at the base of the dunes, and it shines
on the backhoe that buried her.