Smoke Sick

We will not be able to survive this, so we have to stop it. — Diana Beresford-Kroeger

Boreal haze along the highway, blip of being back in this ecosystem, greeting the magpies and ravens, greeting the new finches, the leaves of the poplars in their brightness and newness, bush instead of wood, what raised me, how long apart from. A relentless, pathological carving into them, if he’s doing it then I’m doing it too, constructing things that don’t alleviate, only exacerbate. Up go the boxes. In go the gas stations. The method by which I got here.

It always feels like I never left, like I’ve always been.

It feels like a different place, gone on without me.

It feels like it’s all about to go up in flames.

Thin straws of rivers. The mineral tracings. Full, arrow-straight roads. The smoke has no discernible shape. It simply is, down here on the ground. It is a world and a signal. Fire exists beyond us, has sponsored our existence, uses us as fuel. We are crowded with obsessions and urgencies, leaning on the old exacerbating planks as the storm descends once more and ever. Fire is drawn, pulled, toward available propellant, toward relation, the winds constant, erasing any moisture.

Look what we’ve made. Our great tribute.