David Lau

Night wind like a wedge

cleared the sky of heat.

Panicked with sleeplessness,

I investigated the window, the stars

were distant monads

against a nymph.

A sound shower,

I picked up a hatchet and met

a hellion of fasting-moving arcus roll cloud.

In this dry torment I counted lightnings,

the Santa Cruz Mountains, nothings

the kabuki player called

from off stage

through a gallon

of make believe.

He wore the fire mask

as thin smoke columns

in a locked car. We evacuated to LA,

found air orange as fires

volcano-ed that glowing resonance

beyond all meaning. Death feared our features,

which were Highway One

and many-structures-lost embers.

The forms ignited two centuries of same old

buildings, mass parties

framed like the kit home. We were left

with bootlegged dialectics—spare parts

in the burn scar,

subatom, motherboard,

soft wheels, trucks, new skate deck—

the odd-angled ship-in-bottle

but possible.

The laborer’s basso profundo

began at the gate of the river

to feed red infrastructure, soldier graves

where the writing on the wall blazed

like Ahed Tamini angry abroad in the arcus air.

Hard with ash we watched

smoke shield the peak.

It concentrated to emblems,

fire lines backed up by flame retardants

amidst the cultural accelerants,

dark hills green blue now

combustible brown redwood

beetle eaten section

pasted with pamphlet and poster.

They displayed Heroes’ Hill unreachable, esoteric

except with this ghost

column of Angolan fighters

reinforced by Cuban artillery.

The forest was

surrounded in the last instance

aflame flamboyant firenado,

scandalous decadence up against the wall.

The graffiti read no snitches nephew

at the Taco Bell on Pacific,

sign purple like a burning

tree passed

around a Food Not Bombs

table under the shade tent from Costco.

We did not run this town,

true association,

when the silent forest man,

teeth bead maker, white whale chaser

came to press us.

He dug up Antigones

around the different organized chokepoints

of controlled burn, remote firing squad.

Blubber heated the kiln near

torch aloe bulked up in mounds.

The fire was outside the gates,

then it was the town.

I rode out with harriers against

the fetishized discourse

mongers with card readers

I did not internalize.

I remained unincorporated

Santa Cruz County, City of Vernon,

Salton Sea, Tehachapi, Tulare. 

The panic became fire, invisible contagion

on sundowner wind,

roasted plague town, while re-dismembered

death in life ended the meeting.

The pitch, fertile and condor,

ran with switch grass under the cardboard,

a minimum space time,

the real pithy and calm, those blocks after the riot.

Tubbs Fire, Windy Fire

Sequoias on fire.

The oldest living rings

blackened with clicking

bump stock of the dealer’s gun.

The Uber driver took us into

the tree hollows, this blasted furnace,

its canopy spreading fire lichen.

Through the enemy,

we vacated the sky city futurist ideal.

We risked dissonance,

the eagle nest in the river mouth,

the no parking sign for a street of RVs.

With one thousand cherry trees in the middle

of the kingdom far from the law

and armed only with our knives,

how did we ever get out?

The people in the fire came for us.

They hired the ganja pilot

post-production later dissolved.

I was born shrooming on the side of an LA freeway.

There was nowhere you could run

that wasn’t tailpipe and crystals

of angry gnomes.

I was bathed by the nurses who combed my hair.

An hour later one of the younger ones

was down, so we ate a little more.

We were shopfloor,

a little cheaper,

the burning core.

We sipped on this clip.

Muons in frisson

added detail to the scale

in the weak

arms shipment. Then the water

came, hills green upside

down, and Pilarcitos Creek flowed

Moore Creek, Laguna Creek, Yellow Bank.

Flame sucked marrow from claw.

They kept her

heart beating with champagne.

My name and I lived in a god.

I said everything I forgot

in the fire when the coast 

turned to desert. In time

there rose the redwoods bombed back

by storms. Balls of yellow and blue, the trees

turned gray matches, moist moss

in the eucalyptus returned. The creeks Liddell

overflowed the ocean. They called him

Ismail Haniyeh. He was killed in the Battle

of Salamis long ago,

antiquity of late this onetime.

My writing was never clearer, faint fire stream

carved in pencil. I set down

notes in a pamphlet of poems

I held in my hand,

a book of the book.