Like A Fire

by

Patricia Wallace

—after Teju Cole

Nearby, in the Jemez Mountains, scorched
in an earlier fire, pick-up-stick trees
scatter denuded mountains.

The moment of burning can be beautiful:
yellow ochre, cadmium orange,
alizarin
crimson, the sienna palette called burning—

but get close and it travels like lightening
through any conduit—house, forest, body—
inflaming air and lung sacs
with every breath
until nothing’s not burning

not even the Thames in Turner’s painting
where the river mirrors the conflagration
engulfing
the Houses of Parliament. He sketched
from vantages on the banks, then burned

his canvas with smears of color and light,
a glow
we used to call otherworldly. Apocalyptic,
we say now, as in, all is uncovered,
laid bare, as happens with endings. Burning,

we feel elsewhere. Daily, new devastation
on our screens, fugitive mages we gaze at

unseeing. They look like a picture. Not like a fire.
But there’s no elsewhere in fire. Only burning.

Patricia Wallace’s poems and essays have appeared in PEN America, River Heron, bosque, The Iowa Review, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and The North Dakota Quarterly. She has contributed chapters to The Columbia History of American Poetry and Oxford’s American Literature in Transition. For many years she edited the “Poetry 1945—” section of the Norton Anthology of American Literature. She splits her time between the high desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico and the Hudson River Valley.