Fire Season

All the angels of Tie Siding were on fire.

The famous sky was gone.

Presumably the mountains were still there, invisible in haze.

OK,

there was only one angel, but she was a torch in the wind, beside

the wind-ripped American flag the post office flies.

OK, she wasn't

literally on fire.

Maybe her angelic red hair made me think she was

ablaze as it flaunted the prairie and made a festival of itself.

There

was a fireworks stand nearby, entirely beside the point, as was the

Fourth of July.

It was really dry.

It was fire season.

It was the

wind festival, featuring an angel standing in it, letting her red hair

conflagrate history, reduce it to ash, bid it start anew, erase the sky

with atrocity's own smoke.

She wore, besides her flame of hair,

blue jeans and a singlet.

She was violent in the wind.

I started

walking toward her.

I'm still walking toward her, no idea what to

say when I get there.

Source: X poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2003)