It hurts right in my apocalypse

Here in the not-quite early morning light
the livid sky’s an admixture of Roman
silver from the north & powder blue
from the south, a flimsy ashy cool
you can feel retreat with the leafy shadows

through the high school’s shuttered track & spring-
green field of synthetic turf, past its concrete
slopes, portables, bleachers, & on out to
the forest edge that casts a dusty shade,
whose veil opens to the flat wide trail

forested by crops & thickets of sorrel,
tanoak, bay laurel, maidenhair, madrone,
bracken, huckleberry, poison oak, black-
berry, catkins — all fed by a drought-
obstinate watershed that runs by anemic

rill or riffled creek down the San Lorenzo
Valley. Old-growth coast redwoods people it,
astride the air swaying their languorous crowns,
some though fallen, blackened, cankered, snagged,
stumped, broken — it’s difficult to kill redwood,

even the dead ones aren’t dead. Three miles
upstream, they made gunpowder for mining;
at the Blue Cliff, they blasted the blue-white
deposits, moved the limestone ore to three
nearby kilns & fired it with woodcords for three

or four days to calcinate a lime they
used to rebuild the city after the 1906
earthquake. In a year, oil-burning kilns
obsolesced this method & the quarry
closed. Abutting the bones that remain, last

seasons’ fires echoed & scarred the hillslope
with orange fire, dense pall, & wools of smoke
that glowed the region a lunar wormwood
yellow that Tarkovsky would have envied,
& what remains of the crucible, skeletal

ulnae jut blackened out of nascent green.
Distant fires leer & seethe, but “whilst we’re off
looking for red, in comes green”. In deeper
parts of the forest, redwoods still smolder,
heart alive in heat & still not dead.

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