Unpublished. California's dry hills in the summer have a distinct smell that I wanted to capture, along with a memory of the 1970 Fish Canyon fire in the Oakland hills. The last part wandered out of the poem and another story came in. Kestrels, not incidentally, are also called "windhovers." Briones is a reservoir and regional park, and as far as I know has never actually had a wildfire. For that and other reasons I 'm not entirely satisfied with the poem but I did find this picture of Briones, whose images of trees talked to me, so here it is.
Fire road, Briones
All at once and then after years of practice
the sum of memories unrecalled
arrives wrapped in a single garment:
the brown robe a man wears plodding up
this dirt road, wielding a palmer’s staff
past live oaks, one dead – unleaved by lightning,
watching from on an overlook above
this false lake; and the knowing of
what it was we were ballasting
what we sense we may have become
(an iron mass in the deep hold quietly
changed to rust yet holds fast the tacking keel).
The man waves greeting to the roasting smell
of dry grass and dust; ridge-risen a kestrel hovers
over meadow vole or lizard,
equal in their unawareness, so engaged
in ground and life to act in
ignorance of death, remote and slow until
it is not. The fire struck tree observes
the act and the art of practice,
of staring with blind determination into
all that is predetermined, written off
and buried. Push back your hood and let us talk,
let us be here where we never were together,
where roses answer the call of iron and
oak is woven into raiment.
By this logic thousands still live
in the town shadowed behind us,
everyone we know. The water below
is fenced off, untouchable;
who possesses such reservoirs. My own
memory is the hillside burned, doling out
spoonfuls of ash to compromised survivors.
It stinks and the ground smokes.
Blind hawks feast at the water’s edge.
Forget this. You are still gone.
