Fall Fire

Fire and fall often go together in California. The air is hot and dry and the tinder ready to explode. The first fire was caused by a small plane crash in the local mountains.

Those mountains are filled with trees and when I need a fix of tree energy I like to drive up Water Canyon Road to Tehachapi Mountain. An important scene in my book takes place there when the young heroines go up to the mountains to gather materials for a basket. They commune with one very special old tree, based on a real ponderosa pine that would have been growing there when Andy Greene was a child. I hope it’s still there, its thick trunk standing strong, its silvery needles shining  bright against the deep blue sky.

A few days later many more fires were started by lightning strikes hurled to earth by a blustery storm. It graced us with some much needed rain, but unfortunately not enough to put out the fires that consumed tens of thousands of acres of brush and trees.

Here is a poem I wrote about another fire in the mountains – one the kids and I could see from the schoolyard. It’s written in the Dead Man form invented by the poet Marvin Bell.

The Dead Woman and the Fire

1.

The dead woman walks through the schoolyard while children,
bright embers, scatter before her.
From a towering mushroom shaped cloud, a leaf falls to the desert floor.
The dead woman picks it up – oak – scorched.
The inferno bigger than Seattle and Minneapolis combined,
lets go its flakes of snow that settle on cars and turn hair gray.
A school of droning clownfish flies off to spit at the burning bush.
The dead woman watches them go.

2.

“My mother says it’s the end of the world,” the school girl whispers.
“Oh,” the dead woman replies, not knowing what else to say,
the girl’s mother being right.
Just look at the roiling black clouds, the sun orange at midday,
the moon smoldering in the midnight sky.
A life lived for the next generation is over, this the dead woman knows.
All will perish but the hard seed that for hundreds of years has lain in wait
for fire to crack its shell.