PARTICULATE MATTER
If all you counted were tires on the cars left in driveways and stranded beside the roads.
Melted dashboards and tail lights, oil pans, gas tanks, window glass, seat belt clasps.
The propane tanks in everyone’s yards, though we didn’t hear them explode.
R-13 insulation. Paint, inside and out. The liquor store’s plastic letters in puddled
colors below their charred sign. Each man-made sole of every shoe in all those closets.
The laundromat’s washers’ round metal doors.
But then Arco, Safeway, Walgreens, the library—everything they contained.
How many miles of electrical wire and PVC pipe swirling into the once-blue sky:
how many linoleum acres? Not to mention the valley oaks, the ponderosas, all the wild
hearts and all the tame, their bark and leaves and hooves and hair and bones, their final
cries, and our neighbors: so many particular, precious, irreplaceable lives that despite
ourselves we’re inhaling.
—from Poets Respond
November 25, 2018
__________
Molly Fisk: “So many of us live near enough to Paradise, CA to have been under the pall of smoke its burning created. I’m in Nevada City, a Sierra foothills town equally likely to burn, equally hard to evacuate. Like many others in CA, we were wearing N95 masks and staying indoors, and talking to each other about what was in this particulate matter. A phrase we didn’t think of much ten years ago, and now everyone knows.” (web)
Molly Fisk is the guest on Rattlecast #61! Click here to watch …
You must be logged in to post a comment.