As When Drought Imagines Fire

Loot my point of view,

                                               hove my heart

                free from its hived booth

though I know your smoke,

                                            its black blossom,

is a substance I’ll never become:

                              colors

              of plaster and grass I’ve prepped

flawlessly, rivers I’ve whittled thin.

It’s a personal matter to me, the wind.

But let it be our cathedral feeling:

                                                              a sculpture

of ash

                               dragging its robe over

the hills because of us,

                                             because of me.

Yellow is hurried,

                              but red moves like a swarm

               through toothpick homes,

               pans over roofs,

                             where the ethos we child

                                             from the ground

will blacken to ruin.

                                                           Let’s glory

              this roughened nap

of landscape,

                           this parched Arcadia,

with one nude-struck match and a breeze.