The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: wildfire

  • Intermission: A Smoky Sea

    On the floor of a sea of smoke
    crawling to an empty conch
    I pass a woman out walking
    her dog neither with a mask
    and she smoking a cigarette.

    And some bony lady jogging
    thru the smoke and fog up
    and down the local side
    walks a serious jogger in
    deed sans nuisance mask.

    Toodeloo, I whistle in my
    mask, in my car, windows
    rolled, destooled, the bars
    all closed, on my way to
    the store for milk and beer.

    Now a Worst World Air Award
    for this smoke covered coast
    an Atlantis sunk in smoke
    a coal drenched London
    an orange Tambora scarf.


  • Untitled and Unfinished

    The tall fall fires out west follow
    the humongous hurricanes blowing
    across the headline news, shooting
    embers across the dance floor valley,
    licking into the canyon columns
    of textual innuendos of who
    belongs here and who doesn’t.

    The wind and rain and flickering
    flames know no such distinctions.
    All belong to the sky and forests,
    to the ocean, mountains, and deserts,
    to one another embracing bumper
    to bumper against the noise unleashed
    updating itself every second breath.

    Some too old to dance seem left behind.
    You can’t fight a hurricane like you can
    a fire. The new news is the new normal,
    seven by twenty-four and minute by
    minute. Still, all we know of the missing
    and the ones still on the road is that
    they are missing and still on the road.

    “Oh, God. Oh, Mother,” the Civil War
    soldier cried as he burnt up. Why,
    when a single bullet would have sufficed?
    The trees are drying and the ground sinking.
    Will all not sunk into the sea burn
    into the sky? The caravans continue
    heel to toe to higher and cooler ground.

    And that’s the way it is.