More fires blacken the world’s ribs. I look,
but don’t dwell on char, anguished yet hungry
for beauty, for lepidopteran scales, a Labrador’s
muzzle, a bromeliad. Rejecting Plato, Aristotle
claims the good is never one thing only. Fortune
sets some at the fire line. Others work farther back
with smaller buckets—a poem, a line, a word.
My children, I know, shake their heads at me:
Fancy mother deluding herself so. But look!
While Washington abandons the West,
an ordinary driver halts his flight to pick up
a stranger rolling her wheelchair down
an ash-gusted road. We do not need power
to be good, only discipline, opportunity
close at hand. Daily, great evils threaten—
not nation states, not lone men with repeating
magazines, but anger, envy, and despair.
We cast them out like the robed angels
in museum paintings, out beyond the borders
of the frame, not just once, but time and again,
like one sweeping. The November leaves refuse
to go down quietly. They bleed and bleed
before they fall. We cherish the loudest
between pages, breathing the fragrance
of dying until it’s ours. We braid habit, studying
ourselves in the mirror. We doubt our survival,
but with a roar, the flames pass over.
READ MORE
Nurses fleeing fast-moving Camp Fire scramble to save patients – and themselves [NBC]
California’s first heroes deserve our gratitude [The Sacramento Bee]
Devon Balwit teaches in Portland, OR. She has six chapbooks and three collections out or forthcoming, among them: We are Procession, Seismograph (Nixes Mate Books), Risk Being/Complicated (A collaboration with Canadian artist Lorette C. Luzajic); Where You Were Going Never Was (Grey Borders); and Motes at Play in the Halls of Light (Kelsay Books). Her individual poems can (or will) be found here as well as in The Cincinnati Review, apt, Posit, The Carolina Quarterly, Vector Press; Red Earth Review; The Turnip Truck(s), Drylandlit; Eclectica, SWWIM, Peacock Journal, and more.
Image by Hermes Rivera.
