6.7.17

Bull Run Fire



Five miles east

wind in my face

and the fire plume,

a violet volcano

Five miles east, but close enough,

the white wash coat of burned juniper

forcing the Saturn in the nostrils,

Hackberry Mountain, fizzling out

in a downpour, monsoon downdrafts

blowing ash into a many shouldered beast

We went home and made a list

of what we would need when

the call for evacuation came,

craving a disaster to bring

the memory awake, the dreaming down.

Great thin-legged clouds spiderwalk

their way across the purple ridge,

purple with weather; precious things

shake in their cupboards, forgotten.

Lightning pounds the mesas,

the wind pushing down in atomic bundles

of white orange flasks of violence,

a curtain on the sun, a dirty window of light,

a blowout of compressed desires

pressing the sky, re-animating us