I wrote "this ash" as I watched ash fall over our valley, leaving the last remnants of what the McKinney Fire had destroyed forty miles to the south. The first fire season that I lived in Oregon (6 years ago) I wiped ash off of my truck and brushed it off my horses without much thinking about what it actually was. Now when ash blankets our farm, where it may have come from is all I can think about.
THIS ASH
Smoke climbs the horizon along our south pasture,
a pallet of browns and grays driven by a straight-line wind until
it tumbles over the mountain range and spills across the thirsty valley
like a carefree
child down a hill.
Forty miles from here,
rural homes and small towns are
burning up and floating away
in silence.
(I must confess
to you that
calling it silent
is a lie -
wildfire is preposterously
loud, a
gulping, snarling, ravenous beast but
it would seem the question we ask about
falling trees and the availability of a listening ear applies
to flaming trees and burning
houses and the interest of
a newsman’s
camera.)
But ashfall is quiet, no
matter how many
ears are available to collect the grief
that might screech and howl from these tiny pieces
if only they could deliver a message from
whom they once belonged.
Old photographs and stacks
of mail, painted walls and
foot-worn porches with creaking stairs, and
dolls and toy trains and pen marks
on door frames
and a truck with
the keys in the ignition and
the leather collar of a faithful
dog in the passenger seat
and the blue plaid shirt and a cane of an old man who could not outrace the flames.
Now they are all floating and falling and flying and falling again,
hot,
soft
snow
adrift
in a copper sky,
painting cars and hair and rooftops belonging to strangers,
the rumps of cattle and
the taut skin of ripening tomatoes and
the inside of lungs, having ridden in
on a breath. Maybe they’ll slip
through permeable barriers
and travel blood streams
through chambers of hearts and
beneath the wrinkles of
pulsing brains and calloused fingerprints
and
perhaps a few lucky ones
aren’t done yet, but are expelled instead
for a second chance
on an exhale or
a word or
a shout or
transferred with
a kiss
and I wonder if this ash,
these gray flecks of
what was and
what could’ve been
cling
to existence until
there’s nowhere to go but
a dustpan or a rag or a vacuum bag,
swept from places still claimed by the living,
and there, perhaps, these tiny ghosts
descend for the last time,
weak and battered and
with
a
sigh,
go
cold.
