Susan Harvey

Palimpsest

Runes and glyphs emerge
from the path of the fire.

Where the fence was a winding four-lined
staff notated and singing with birds
now only only a few angular letters
from an unknown alphabet
stand in silent charred isolation.

Stripped of their cover the hills
reveal elegant scripts of deer trail
white against the black ground.

We begin to grasp that
the land is profoundly layered
with texts that we cannot decipher.
The fire has scraped away
the familiar comprehensible
surface of our world to expose
untranslatable messages.

The wind drops a singed scrap
of newsprint at my feet
fragile as a butterfly’s wing
illegible characters fading
into the heat-silvered paper.

In a burnt grove
one scalded pear tree
emits improbable blossoms.

Among the grapefruit

In the days after the fires we came upon
our neighbor reclining comfortably under
his old grapefruit tree surrounded by
fruit fallen from the scorched crown

a few full and bright yellow but most
partially blackened into lesser phases
of moons knocked from their orbits
to the patch of ashy grass.

Behind him what was left of his house —
two low sets of brick steps rising
from left and right to a vanished stage
and three cinderblock walls leaning over

a pit of indecipherable fragments.

Such treasures had been in that cellar!
Homemade pickles luminous as stained
glass in their mason jars. Slivovitz and
grappa distilled from his orchards waiting

to be lavishly joyfully poured. As he lay
under the tree he spoke quietly into his
phone — perhaps to someone who had
once sipped brandy in that obliterated house.

He had not heard our approaching steps.
In silence we witnessed how after
unfathomable loss people calmly
recline among the ruins of their houses

and talk softly of their past happiness.

The bitter days of clarity

In the last smoky months of that summer
the sun oozed out of the blackened hill like
a drop of blood squeezed from a finger tip.

Before the fire came we hated
the sun for drying our lands
but when the smoke took the sun away
we conceived a world
perpetually shrouded by dust
and we were afraid.

In those bitter days of cruel clarity
we comprehended our precariousness.

Remit, remit.

It is winter now and the ranch
is wrapped in mist instead
of smoke. Green threads begin
to glow in furrows left by
the seed drill in our charred pastures.
Their shimmering slowly erases
the scripts revealed by the fire.

Susan Harvey