Fire Study
Thick split logs of Eucalyptus
hurl smoke into a face.
Release the damper and note
the change in pitch,
low whoosh of flame,
mid-ranged cracks the opposite of ice.
What might surprise: coals, orange and constant—
You wanted to be left whole,
chips of chinbone free to fall apart.
I’m sorry. What we toss to the wind
flies back into our mouths powdered.
Do we detect a grit? The rift
between ocean cliffs too far to fathom,
the tectonic clip too quick, the grind
of land on land an itch
scraped so long the scar shines.
What is the texture of ash on the tongue?
The crematorium burns but bone does not
break apart like skin. What remains
is calcium, the hard crust, bone of bone,
the rigid, twisted bits.
On the sink board in the hotel black ash
like grains of granite. Cigarette smoke
soaked into the sheets.
The window to the courtyard
a mouth screwed shut.
I spend the night waking to the gasps
of my own cravings.
If I could have had my way:
the north coast, beach fire,
saltpans boiling down to dust, abalone
feast on the shore: mushrooms on toast,
butter and garlic, mist,
and water: breath catching, bone deep
cold, waves that heave
and heave, raindrops
plopping in drift ash,
your own ashes clay colored, dry boluses and free bits,
swirling around us as we’d swim, our dive belts
weighting us down
to the bottom.
I went wanting to know
where the smoke goes.
If the door had a window did the people ever look.
If the mandatory box burned first. If a flame at all.
If the bits really did twist.
If twisted how. If small how.
If hard if porous.
Sometimes all that is
obvious is the black
peeled surface of the wood stove,
stripped of itself.
Now the flames quick and menace, the sparks
catch on the rug, the heat
envelopes, the dark surrounds,
the smoke rolls
thick up the flue.
Now there are hardly any abalone left
to harvest, the poor ocean snails so stressed
they won’t eat. Red tide. Harvest ban.
Your ashes on the side
of a mountain
whose forest just went up in flames.
No one promised
you would get the life or death you wanted.
What if at the end nothing
is what you believed you desired. The land and the depths
capable of their own
reinventions.
What if saying this allows longing
to spring up, a bacterial welcome mat,
a kind of cleansing that combusts
close to bone.
Cerro Ballena
The Atacama is a thin strip of land
on the edge of ocean. As of this writing: the driest place
on earth, the center climatologists call
absolute desert.
Observatories dot the coastal range, the usual
atmospheric veil pulled away, the cosmos
exposed, like the bones of a face.
I read there you can actually poke the heavens—
there the lack of moisture means
any dead body left lying
does not break down, not on the usual time scale.
Almost all the living decay
or blow away, but when they began to widen
the Pan American highway locals already
named one hill Cerro Ballena for its accumulation
of fossilized bone. The skeletons of over 40
individual large baleen whales dominate the site.
With them: billfishes, three kinds of seal, and the bizarre
aquatic sloth. The hill is the rare home to the mass strandings
of four separate die-offs—
the orientation and condition of their skeletons
point to death at sea. After ingesting
harmful algae bloom their bodies drifted
to an estuary to rest—
not on the sea bed but the high tidal sands—
all facing the same direction.[1]
[1] Qts from: Vesilind, Pritt J. “The Driest Place On Earth,” National Geographic.
Amanda Hawkins is a Tin House and Bread Loaf Scholar and won the Editor’s Prize for Poetry at The Florida Review. Her poetry has been published in Orion, The Massachusetts Review, and Tin House, among others. She holds an MA in theological studies and is an MFA candidate at UC Davis. You can find her at www.amandahawkinspoet.com.
Read two poems and a Letter to America poem by Amanda Hawkins also appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by Elijah_Sad, courtesy Shutterstock.
