Months after the last spark is stomped out Lennon and I drive up the Poudre Canyon amidst the stretches of scar tissue. This is what they don’t put on the postcards—lodgepoles like needles, acres of dusty black—an overlook reduced to carbon. I never knew where Cameron Peak was, but maybe it never mattered anyway, like the alphabetical name of the storm battering the door. Friends called from Fort Collins and lamented the smoke in the air; ash flaked and dusted the railings of my childhood home. Ravens emerged from their wild pockets and roosted on streetlamps and clumps of aspens sighed at the turning of a cycle. A bear rolled coughing onto a college campus. Lennon sent a newspaper clipping of orange skies, which loomed from the corkboard above my desk for months as if to say greetings, from the mouth of the inferno — desolation is never so far as you hope to imagine. I adjust the rearview mirror as Lennon queues My Motorcycle. He points out a ram as we curve with the road and river.
When you and I talk about the future, we do so with our eyes closed.
blaze-kissed trunks silent
beds of charcoal already
succeeding themselves
