The Last Word On Nothing

The smoke started
while I was in the air.
I first saw it,
after my plane landed,
as a video on my phone—
a gold and gray billow
just two miles into the mountains
from the green property
where we lived.
“Oh good, you’re home.
You can help protect the house
from the new wildfire,”
my landlord texted, joking,
but only half.

I’d been in California working,
chasing birds in the footprint of
an older burn,
an entire redwood forest stripped to black.
Those around me
had felt it as devastation—after all, some had taught
their children to walk
under the eaves of that once-lush cathedral.

I, having never seen it before transformation,
had felt nothing, and had felt guilty for it,
and guiltier still for loving the way
that the flames had overwintered
here and there
then resurged
inside the hollow trunks of still-living trees—
simultaneously
burning and resprouting.

Now, I was in Washington for just two days.
Long enough to move
some art and photos and documents
to a friend’s house in town
as our evacuation level rose to “be ready.”
Long enough to watch the thin column of smoke
become a pyrocumulus
and the trees across the highway
become torches
lighting up the night.

The rest,
I watched on my phone from Alaska—
the fire in abstract
a heat map, updating online
in a spreading rash
of deep red dots across the contour lines
of drainages and slopes
where I had walked
and run
and thought
and eaten thimbleberries
and admired larches turning gold
with the flame colors of autumn.
One night, a huge flare lit up
the trail cam near my house—
fire racing down the mountain
towards the desk where I drew
and the bed where I slept.

The photos came with a text that yelled
“F U C K”,
from the lover
I broke with
before leaving,
before the fire,
in the thick of a heatwave
that had depleted us both.
The remote immediacy of disaster
somehow fit
our last terrible week
and the strange closeness
that remained
in the physical distance between us.

And still, I felt nothing
besides guilty
for my absence,
as people
I loved
breathed air thick
with the ashes
of places
I loved.

When I came home, finally
under the shadow of that towering cloud,
I saw
what the fire had become,
fingering south
through the trees
loosing a thousand threads of smoke to join
and rise,
and in the wake,
the mountains across from my house
black as death along their backs
and yet

still striped with green.

And I cracked, finally
with heartbreak
and
possibility.

What a thing
to become a torch
of light
and air
and burn through
and yet,

somehow,

still grow.