OK, some newer poems.
I'm not sure how many of these I will actually get to.
This is the second poem of reminiscence that I've written,
and it refers to two fires.
One was the 1977 Ventana Cone fire
that burned through the forest behind Big Sur,
and the other is a fire which happened
in Minnesota last summer.
Beautiful Dawn.
We were three coming over a ridge interrupted
by stars in a truck of cold fruit for drying for winter.
Then one of us woke, said "beautiful dawn,"
and slept again.
But the direction was wrong and the hour,
and when he and I rose later, far into the light,
it was unmistakable smoke.
It took eight days to reach that place at last.
The backfire crew in their yellow jackets
ate gratefully of the bruising fruit.
Its sweetness ran from their chins.
They worked up canyon and vanished, dripping flame.
In the photographs, our teeth, like theirs,
still sweat with dust and gone trees.
Bandannas stiffen, exhausted, around each neck.
Now almost 20 years later in the middle of night, I wake.
This fire is 100 miles distant.
I will never see it.
By first light, the winds will have shifted.
The scent have vanished, as the visible and invisible hours
of those years have vanished, consuming,
consumed as that love did.
But I breathe it in.
I breathe my own life in the dark,
eat gratefully of a bruised and half remembered,
half still sleeping sweetness.