Self Portrait as the Burning Plains of Eastern Oregon
Oliver de la Paz
Let me start with fire. A little blaze lit to clear back the scrub brush
brought by the winter storms. Let the air ting with each leaf pop
as the ash of prairie grasses rise skyward.
And let that fire grow with each gust
shot straight out of the Cascades far to the west.
The curlicues of smoke fill a sky, void of mountains,
while the corralled horses several hundred yards away
pace nervously back and forth.
I’m trying to remember how everything settles down
after a fire. How the outcroppings of rock stand out farther
in those charred, moonish surfaces. I’m trying to remember
the nonchalance of a boy used to such things.
How the seasonal burnings turned the sky umber
and how each wind seemed to fill our houses with soot.
Springtime meant that everything would burn
and so, I too would torch my name into every picnic bench,
every combustible. A book of matches and a boy was never
an accident. Nor was the little recourse I had in those days.
Boredom was an arrow shot straight into the ground. But I’m here now.
My name is not a fire. My name is not a story of fire.
I’ve got nothing in common with that element, save contempt
for the place of my youth and a hunger for air.
I’m watching the horses closely—how they’re starting to canter
in circles as the heat from the brush blurs the atmosphere,
makes everything look like its underwater.
There’s beauty in their fear, like the stun of a hushed landscape
after a catastrophe. And there’s beauty in a boy,
shameless in his need for moments to explode.
That hunger? If you hold your breath long enough, you can feel
the weight of the horses as they run in faster and faster circles
but really, they’re in no mortal danger. They’ll settle down
to a trot, then rub their sides against the fence posts to feel warmth.
Time takes air and fuel and in the end what’s left is smoke.
A blacked out soda can. Maybe a plastic lid fused to stone. A refusal
to forget childhood’s scald. But also a kind of forgiveness. Really,
there’s nowhere to run, save in ever-widening arcs.
In that broad expanse of charred land, the wind moves
without impediment like a boy grown used to his name. And what’s left
of the brush crumbles to the touch.
Autumn Scene as Lullaby
In my nighttime, everything that moves loves
and is afraid—the white tufts of the hares veering
from the patchwork lattice in the garden,
your mother’s incidental kiss on your lips,
the moon, the rooks, the tires on the bluing roads
to where the hellions in the rail yard adapt
their pitches to the winds and sidearm
rocks at the passing grain-cars in the dark.
They cheer the spark of the stones
against their speeding metal.
And in the absence of the trains, the world
returns to the heavenly bodies, the cold
dependable light of childhood. Son,
I have closed the windows letting moths
fight for all I have custody over—the lamps,
the books—cities of my own making.
Alder leaves fall and rise with the breezes
and the train sounds like a witness from a past century.
I would kill for you. I would be killed for you.
Despite all the pathos love’s door invites, the purpose
of nights like these is to ask the questions
and fail to understand. To listen intently to the trains
hurtling past all promise. To know
there are mysteries more merciful than the dark.