Today is my 61st birthday. That threw the day
into sharp focus, like, this is who I am. I installed paintings on slender
straight trees and in the studio, and then about a dozen people from Skagway
joined us and the Alderworks community. The paintings spurred lots of stories
and tall tales. Ed shared poetry he’s written recently. Various dogs drifted
through. It was very sweet. A good birthday I’ll remember for a long time.
Here's a recent poem Ed wrote about the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise:
Breathing Deep
First my brother texts me
that Paradise is in flames,
our birth town
in the Sierra foothills
where Opa hammered
a home together
in a ponderosa grove
that reminded him of Germany,
where Oma planted
Forget-Me-Nots
in the iron-dense earth.
Then I see on CNN
the hurricane of embers
swirling in a whiplash dance;
every tree a blazing exclamation point
above puddles of boiling asphalt.
On NPR I hear
of the fire’s bared teeth
swallowing horses whole,
then deer, bears, ambulances, hospitals, homes
and the people who flee them
on melting shoes.
On NBC I hear about
the clamor of popping trees
like a chaos of cannon fire,
sky blacker than the
ninth plague on Egypt.
On Facebook I read of
how my cousins drive through flames
to rescue their aging mother;
how they get lost in the smoke,
then huddle for hours
singing hymns
in a parking lot island in hell.
In the Times I read
of my old friend Kevin
whose useless car won’t start,
so he resigns to die
in an easy chair
“with a New Yorker magazine,
his cockatoo,
two tree frogs and a lizard,”
only to emerge, hours later,
to a silent world of ash.
On FoxNews I learn
how chimneys serve
as grave markers,
how chips of teeth and scraps of bone
become precious finds
to families of the missing.
Two-hundred-miles south,
not heeding the warnings
of NPR, NBC, Facebook, and Fox News,
I step outside into the haze,
gaze deep into the honey colored sky
and fill my lungs with Paradise.
