Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Wildfire
after Wallace Stevens
I
Among acres of old-growth forests,
The only moving thing
Was the flame of the wildfire.
II
We are of one pyroecology,
Like a planet
In which there are 70,600 annual wildfires.
III
The wildfire unfurls in the Santa Ana winds.
It was a small arson in paradise.
IV
Humans and trees
Are kin.
Humans and trees and wildfires
Are kin.
V
We do not know which to fear more,
The terror of combustion,
Or the terror of conflagration,
The wildfire igniting
Or just after.
VI
Dry brush filled the backwoods
With abundant fuel.
The head of the wildfire
Consumed it, to and fro.
The heat
Blazed in the mouth
An oxygenated clause.
VII
O firefighters of America,
Why are so many of you inmates?
Do we not see how the wildfire
Walks around the cells
Of the prisons around us?
VIII
I know particulates,
And toxic, inescapable smoke;
But I know, too,
That the wildfire is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the wildfire jumped containment,
It scarred the edge
Of one of many vectors.
X
At the sight of wildfires
Reaching the wildland urban
Interface, even the insurers
Cried out sharply.
XI
We drove through California
In a fast car.
Once, a fear choked us,
In that we mistook
The red sign of flammable gas
For wildfires.
XII
The people are evacuating.
The wildfire must be raging.
XIII
It was fire season all year.
It was burning
And it was going to burn.
The wildfire spread
Across scorched-earth.
Craig Santos Perez is an indigenous Pacific Islander writer from Guam. He is the author of five books, including his most recent collection of ecopoetry, Habitat Threshold (2020). He teaches at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Header photo by David A. Litman, courtesy Shutterstock.
