WEATHER CHANGE
….those years now lost, that were true.
- William Stafford (“You Forget”)
Even though California’s candle burns at both ends,
north and south, the air is clean and crisp between
hungry, man-eating flames – feeding tight tornados
of hellfire, leaping infernos connecting black ash
to smoke-laden heavens – it is clear from here
to the granite Kaweahs and the near shadows
of leather-leafed blue oaks falling long and dark
down blond hillsides. You would not know that
there were wars, or any frenzied men in yellow
Nomex stretched along dry skirmish lines,
or young men dressed in desert camo pitched
a long ways from home. You could not know it
from wind or weather unexplained, nor from
the heifers just becoming mothers, finding
babies behind them for the first time, nor from
the coyotes walking among them like scruffy
town dogs on official business. “Those were
the days,” I’d say, when faces came more quickly –
comrades in love, in lust with the wild and
unexpected shared that seems more like distant
dreams we lived and somehow survived
to now forget. But on days like this, a face
will come calling from out of the tree shadows,
through the gray veil to remind me, to replay
a detailed scene before my rewrite – and
I wonder which were true while off the coast
of Baja, a fresh hurricane spins this way.
- for Jimena