WILDFIRE JOURNAL 5

WILDFIRE JOURNAL: We're all gathered in the parking lot outside the community center basking on the sun. It's a street party of sorts. I'm reading poetry while waiting for my iPad to charge on the generator, my car is taking too long to recharge it and I worry about the car battery. I have contingencies, I park on a grade in case I have to pop-start it. Having a working car right now is tantamount to survival. My gauge has dipped below the half-way mark.

Still no power in most of the North Bay, and PG&E is planning yet another power shutdown. We never got any power restored during the golden window of opportunity. So it’s all moot.

There are evacuees sleeping in their vans all along the roads of West Marin. While waiting for my iPad to charge, I read an unintelligible poem called Irish Poetry by Billy Collins, I'm thinking of calling Sam to come down the hill as there is free lunch and iced coffee. Coffee!

But I don't know where my cellphone is, and besides, it doesn't get good reception. Time to kill, I flip to another random poem: what was the likelihood I would turn to a poem by Molly and Sam’s uncle, called Colonoscopy, the title says it all, and I realized, No shit!

We're all being reamed out and annealed one way or the other by this wildfire. Even Paul Muldoon has a few rhymey bits in this issue of PEOTRY, and yes, it's really spelled that way on the cover, I kid you knot.

Reminds me of some of the kids I teach poetry to, who can't spell poetry on their poetry journals, but they're been burned out of their homes. I'm supposed to be teaching them poetry about fire, floods and other disasters, and here I am smack dab in the middle of it all, an involuntary evacuee, staying in an abandoned house with no water or power, worrying about whether or not

I have enough gas to get to the nearest gas station with electricity—over the bridge to RIchmond, the twisted intestine of the Bay Area. Truth be known, I need my tablet charged because when the sun sets, its only yourself that needs looking to in an empty house in the dark. Downloaded bits from Netflix, and Solitaire helps me make it through the night. That, and a poncho to cover my head, it’s that cold. Dressing requires strategy.

The stars outdo themselves dazzling us with their brilliance, despite the smoke, because there is no artificial light whatsoever in most of the Bay Area. All the Pleiades sisters have their dancing shoes on, and the Milky Way is a river of light. The sliver of a fingernail moon is a promise of the light that will return. We've set our clocks back to the early 1900s, and I think we are the better for it.