Sarah Carey

Ponderosa, you said, when I asked what kind—
those pines off 180 West near Flagstaff
dying from the bottom up. A brush fire, you said—
see how it charred one side of the road, as opposed
to a tree fire roaring over the canopy—
then we top the rise and everything on both sides
is gone: pine, aspen, trees we can’t name,
skeletal remains, and just like that,
who we are is reconfigured, 50-ish miles
from the South Rim, our last-minute diversion
after a cancelled flight, when milky-white
windmills come into view, a foreign sight
to this lifelong Floridian, and I’d like to tell you
I remember our trip, ten, wait, how many years ago,
that angus steak we ate at the North Rim lodge
wildfires just burned to the ground, but you stare at me
over the steering wheel, something in my eyes
you recognize beyond what’s this, what’s this,
my childlike wonder, as if daring me to forget again
who we were in those days, and I’d like to tell you
I’m fine, it’s all still there, like Bergson said,
and Locke before him, and I remember the grand entrance,
the sheer awe of it, my hunger, the proximity
of danger, our conversation over dinner
of death by fall or slippage along a narrow trail,
how often these things happen in real life,
how horrible, how normal, and I’d like to describe
the wall-to-wall glass overlooking layers
of erosion, lost time, but mind aflame,
I’m in a fog, your faithful navigator,
logging distance, shame.

though I didn’t know what for.

He sat at a booth strewn with lightscatter
swag at the writers’ conference, hands steepled
as they were in death,

answered questions from the poets
drawn to the question mark of his being.
He leaned into life as he listened,
nodding at the passionate inquiries—

might he have been water, rivering
toward the broad mouth of the Gulf,
both lucid and opaque—

kind of a two-in-one container,
every scoured stone’s algae imprinted
in his memory? Could he reasonably
be cistern, holder of clean city water

back in the day, or even memory itself,
one writer speculated, reflecting on the duality
of irony. Might it have been a triune God

he stood for, father/daughters/holy ghost,
asked one, who knew him as a father of three,
forgetting the two who came later.
Holy smokes, my father said. That’s a good one.

When I wake, he’s no longer metaphor
but generation: amber the tree’s wound
let spill, the pearl released

from the oyster. Pearls of great price,
he wrote of us, his daughters,
in one book’s dedication,
turning the metaphoric tables

while a vendor next to him rolled metaphor dice
in my dream’s vanishing residue,
an Instagram story not saved to highlights.

We all saw it, flashing right
in front of us: the instant that held everything
we were before we emanated—

fluid, sweet like honey, raw,
always inside the bee