Summer Arithmetic by Molly Fisk

Summer Arithmetic

What else can I tell you?
It’s September now and the fire
started by a burning car
that grew to 50 acres six miles
from my door was contained
overnight. There have only been
two days of real smoke —
it’s confusing facing another lucky
blue morning. Fire season once began
in autumn, not June, not May.
We are waiting for the coming
destruction. We are practicing regret,
and terror, our bodies adrenalized
even in sleep. Now the news is
smoke will kill us in a few years,
First Responders earliest, no
dispensation for the work
of salvation. Meanwhile, laundry
dries on the line, tomatoes ripen.

*

Molly Fisk edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary, her new collection Walking Wheel is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Fisk, who lives in the Sierra foothills, has also won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.