Poetry Monday - August in Wildwood Canyon

The mountains around my hometown are on fire. Again. In October of 2003 my dad's house up in the San Bernardino mountains burned to the ground. My sister and I watched it happening live from our houses in Atlanta on CNN. We recognized it from the street sign and the windows. The pictures on the right are of the house taken from CNN. Fire is horrible. The path is unpredictable and the destruction immense.
While I miss mountains and canyons, I don't miss fire (although I've chosen to live in a city renown for burning down over and over again, go figure, probably my Aries nature to always be close to the flame).

I wrote this poem about me and my sister as teenagers dealing with a sudden wild fire in the middle of the day while we were home alone. When you grow up in a canyon you live with the knowledge that a wild fire or an earthquake could strike at any moment. In the back of your head you have lists of what to grab because the fires move so fast through the dry chaparral that you often have to evacuate very quickly. I have a hard time doing this poem at readings because the emotions of that day rise to the surface very quickly, like they are this morning as I'm scanning the web looking for news about Oak Glen and Yucaipa. I'm praying for everyone in my hometown this morning. (I'm not, however, lighting any candles)

August in Wildwood Canyon

A hawk riding the hot wind passes us
as we sit eating burritos at the kitchen table.

We do not speak. At sixteen and thirteen we know
only soap operas, suntans, and rivalry. Our silence

is filled with the whine and roar of the discer
stalking the brittle grass on the canyon floor.

I am the first to draw breath at the acrid scent.
Fire. We race to the edge of the deck.

The hillside drops a hundred feet until
orderly iceplant gives way to sage and grass.

Flames race up the power poles. Lines snap
and fly like arrows. The abandoned tractor roves

in circles around the live oaks. Now talking
nonstop, moving quickly, we heap left-overs and jars

onto the kitchen floor and, packing photographs
and films into the refrigerator, we preserve

our childhood, but cannot agree on what goes
in the car. China is too fragile, silver can be replaced.

We race back and forth from house to car,
throw in quilts, yellowed wedding dresses, a box

containing a fall made from our great-grandmother’s
loosely braided hair, our grandfather’s college yearbook,

my box of notes from my best friend, my sister’s softball
glove and uniform because she has a game tomorrow.

All but our mother’s last canvas fits into the trunk.
Planes are filling the air with loads of water and the white

walls of mom's room flicker pink as we grab her jewelry box
and join the line of cars leaving the canyon.

Chunks of ash drift onto mailboxes and fences,
settle in small piles. I need headlights to see my way out.

On a safe plateau we huddle together, watch flames
line the ridges, the smoke shift from white to gray.

At dusk we are allowed back. The wind is changing.
The fire is trapped on a ridge high above the canyon.

My sister and I are quiet again. She refuses to ride
with our mother and sits stubbornly in my car.

The line of cars, longer now that parents are home,
winds back through the naked and smoking hillsides,

around curving roads, charred front yards
and back decks burned black. One home is lost.

Not ours. We ride the hot wind back to nothing
that will ever again safely belong to us.