FIRE ON THE OAKLAND HILLS |
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No brutalities on this copper sky day
I am exchanging romantic remarks on a terrace over a lazy lunch on a nappy Sunday The linen is suddenly browned with the sifting of a black ceiling cloud Curled cinders of a morning note float across ten miles of salt bay into my backyard Directions to buy dish soap and vodka are still legible through the musky char This is more than an opera of hurricane weather Treats eaten in a hurry Another argument with life The joy of a rainstorm dissolves to disaster Tinder in a crepe box diminishes the world Neighbors climb the roof with uncertain ladders Like the earthquake two years and three days before, the streets have a holiday freedom Nothing is more important than the observation of this day Do not ignore Do not go on with immediate tasks Connect with someone Take action There are etiquettes But no guarantees Hosing your roof is an emotional gesture to seem alert But it drains the water needed for fighting the flagrant dragon on the hill that's already eating the hearts of your neighbors No matter how bolstered upholstered, credited organized and worthy they watch helpless or flee as refugees from another time Quickly empty the house of only the most precious Everyone has an album an account a special piece of equipment a comforter a convenience a tenderness a lifetime of work Chose ghosts of effort and experience that harbor in a house in careful fear This is an evacuation of your assumptions of invincible suburban safety A woman holds her home on the roof like a fort itemizing the contents below to passing strangers in the street A stamp collection worth a hundred grand inherited from her uncle who owned a shop 47 years on Franklin and Fourteenth Her miniature paintings a tapestry collection in boxes she couldn't deal with before moving her ninety year old mother who lived on the couch in the front room where everyday in the 3 o'clock light she watched on the veneer of the pioneer chest Christ lift up his arms and vividly visit her world My company is a vigilant activist seeker and keeper of moments of madness and ecstasy There is no folly in the fearing when the film clicks hoping to retain the color of pain The lighting cues are theatrical striking all of us with religious guilt because the fire is inexorably beautiful The sky charges an emotional weather shared for miles smelling like a good mesquite restaurant like Bali in constant tropical smolder coconut husks and flesh in a quiet the quality of a spring snowfall We can take this strange melancholy and peel the velvet linings of intimacy and rage as the last refuge of life A day that demands instant inventory of your most precious irreplaceable marks a time when you begin again the spare soul blaze survival and motivation all called in for review. |