Coughing Towards Santa Rosa

The eerie amber light,
sickly and poor,
engulfs the jaywalkers and the delivery trucks just the same.
A filthy white haze hovers:
a choir of angels chain-smoking between jobs.
The horizon’s thick with bunched grime.
We
who are a strange color of same
carry overtures of sighs
as huddled fire-drift coats our lungs.
Embers carry too
on wild uncaring gusts,
hot enough to torch house after house,
leaving nothing but a block of chimneys —
tessellations of desolation —
and blackened husks of cars,
some abandoned mid-road.
One imagines those inside whisked away,
without wallets or shoes,
still breathing, for then,
at least.
Trees smoldered to coal-like bits.
“I cannot see for hundreds of miles,”
calls out the ferryboat captain.
“This is all a nightmare we’re choking awake on.”
With the taste of charcoal and charred wood on the tongue,
bleak and thick,
we hunch and duck under the heaving close sky,
by orange’s palest of yellow.
A bear flag gone limp,
rankled in this unending dusk.
We don particulate-filter masks and
clad our souls in other accoutrements of pseudo-safety,
while the ravaging spreads acre by acre,
and this oddly familiar smoke
(the scent of bonfires or roasting marshmallows
camping
alone under the stars)
has come,
finally —
gentle and lurid,
and all-consuming —
to settle the score.