爥
A wildfire carried by wind,
Consuming life
before realization,
so alive
that rain-soaked moss
withers and lights,
Whips across miles,
Like dust in a gentle breeze
For the orbital lens
An ember rests deep in the ashes
Ripples its old light out in darkness
The bond tears, the grain cracks
And there, it flies free
A destroyer of invisible worlds
We woke up this morning
left the sheets all scorched and melted
Outside our window
Stands a forest of withering pines
We got in the boat, went down the road to the sea
Sat drifting a while
watching the tide
rise past its shore
and crumble the mountains we knew.
We came home around four,
I tripped on the stair.
I sat on the edge of the tub while it filled and ran over
The kids rustled through the tall grass out back
then went on through the pines,
Away.
A fire
Burned down through our necks
And water spilled out from our fingers
We went out walking
under a front-lit sky
Shouts escaped a window,
from that big house on the corner.
Looking in through the walls, the pine, the still-wet paint
There’s the muzzle flare of their mouths, the smoke rising
from their eyes
exhausted.
We walk on
We walk for days and days, and
There is the dome of the roof
The door at its base ajar,
And we look up and learn to see
The far-off fires;
We falter into understanding
And then further on, past memory and unkempt thoughts.
About the title: The various dictionaries of Pleco (the only Chinese dictionary app you will ever need) define 爥, zhú, as “candle,” “to illuminate,” and “to simmer, cook over a slow fire.” It is an old variant of 烛, long out of use in everyday exchange. I found it one day in my dictionary, and I liked the look of it, though I didn’t know exactly what it meant. So I wrote a poem.
It got me thinking about the relationship between anxiety, climate change, and the nature of 21st century problems. I’ve written more since, but that’ll wait for another day.
360 by bike 
Really like this! Thanks, Forrest. I don’t think we should let ourselves hide in the face of the losses that climate change will bring; perhaps that can help make our communities more resilient. Somehow this poem reminds me of that.
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Thanks. People have been talking about anxiety and the modern mind recently, and I think climate change manifests those unconsidered thoughts in very plain terms
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That was beautiful. Really, really well done 🙂
Just out of curiosity, what do you think of the possibility that we won’t be able to stop what’s happening to the environment enough to make a difference?
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I think that it’s a valid thought, but not one I dwell on. It’s one of the reasons I travel: to remind myself that certainty can limit our ability to think and act clearly.
Many people think of that question in binary terms, but you I try to spend more thought on the how than the whether.
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Good point 🙂
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Excellent work. Thanks for sending— and for writing—it. I like the vivid but ambiguous images, e.g, “the door at its base ajar,” that suggest anxiety rather than state it directly. I mean, for example, in contrast with an equally vivid image but directly descriptive line from a poem I read recently; it read, “the wind is wild with leaves. . . ”
I’m also interested in your comment about the [zhu] character—that you “liked the look of it.” I like it, too, maybe because of the contrast of the openness of the left side contrasted with the density of the right, and maybe the resemblance of the left side to a human figure. Quite a difference from Western alphabet where one word can look pretty much like another, [cold] and [clad] for example.
One further comment has to do with your title. [Anxiety], I think is too direct. It tells your reader what to feel. Better, I think to use a more metaphoric term, to let the reader puzzle it out and find the anxiety for [him]self. Sorry, I can’t suggest a better term.
I also liked the picture of your notebook. You may remember how much weight I put on the process by which things get done.
Make more poems and send them on!
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Thanks. For me it’s more that the character contains several others that I already find appealing, and arranged as you said in an attractive way- huo/fire (left) yu/rain (2nd from top right) and then it sort of hints at for me the character 包/bao/package and 虫/chong/insect
Anxiety was supposed to be more of a clasdifier than a title. I’m planning to write further short pieces on the subject. Maybe a prose piece as the first would have ironed out the awkwardness of having it first, or maybe a should have chosen another word as you say
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