Aftermath, The Griffith Park Fire

By Anders Howerton

photo by Colin Remas Brown on flickr

“Vulnerability. The ideal state of a painter. You have to cultivate it.”
– Francesco Clemente

The light has shifted since. It isn’t rushing through the glass
the way it did the day you swirled the cayenne like tiny flames
in the lemon-filled honey jar. It circumvents me now
with its set of parallelograms,

kicks pebbles down my avalanche back.
You are no longer you but a ferryman instead, taking your time
to deliver me at the edge of the blazed bird sanctuary,
charred tree-filigree stitched over the pale ash.

And there I sink slightly—the flies, nutshells,
and shovelheads. The fire has cleansed relentlessly, love
for the oppressor with a dose of revenge.
I grow gray from earlobe to necktie to earth.

I swim the air from pocket to pocket. Smoke shifts
for the funerals. A coyote guards the metallic swarms
embossing the cage of her mate. The ravens’ fur-filled beaks
screech at the jaws in torque toward elsewhere.

A rhyme to the panic.
The rocks thrust their way into the scape, lifted by the rush
of Acheron, disc-shaped aggregates, dykes of basalt
and malachite intersecting the furnaces over the Styx.

I cannot stop running along this torrid ground.
While it is midnight on the Los Angeles River, I am facedow
here at sunrise in Griffith Park. This morning blasts the hollow
skull of the deer, its body thrust upright and antler-locked with an oak.

The light through the ribs wraps me like a cast. Yes. My love, that’s it.
In any case, not yet very clean, this intricate skeleton.
You have been setting your heavy endnotes all day.

I know about your love, detailed by the knee joints caught
in flexion, tendons burned and picked away.
The eyes cannot leave this feast behind.

The wall of flames has jumped and scrambled up
to Dante’s next and final view. Seed and mulch blanket the dead,
and the pornography of green presses and unfolds.

*This piece is informed by http://www.flickr.com/photos/colinbrown/s

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