Poems by Mark Simpson

An Elegy for Franklin Ware, Dead before the Fire Came

by Mark Simpson

From Canary Summer 2024

Mark lives on South Whidbey Island in the Maxwelton watershed near the confluence of Maxwelton and Quade Creeks. The water flows directly into Puget Sound, about a mile away. The land where I live is steep, heavily glaciated, and forested. The last glacial retreat left mostly glacial till – boulders and rocky debris. Melt water from glaciers (my guess) has cut five crevasses 20 to 30 feet deep. Dominant trees: Douglas Fir, Hemlock, Western Red Alder. It's beautiful, and my apple trees look to have a good showing this year.

The fire burned your place,
the black timbers themselves a late elegy—
you’d been dead three years by then.

The fire snaked past Index, up
the county road, jumping Troublesome Creek,
the sound of the falls there burning, too.

It burned your place and all the stuff
you’d left, the stuff no one wanted—
your notebooks of plans and possibilities,
a table, a broken chair.

Good riddance to it all, I think you’d say,
good riddance to the four-wheel drive
to civilization—a place to buy beer
and cigarettes, sugar, salt, and
whatever you needed to patch the roof
when it began to leak.

Good riddance and no regrets and what
were you doing there, anyway?
The fire sluiced up the canyon, up
mountainside, trees and brush primed
and ready for it.

This year, another fire burned it all again—
amazing how hungry flames can be, consuming
the consumed, making sure, cleaning up, a
consecration of the nothing left.

Troublesome Creek ran dark with ash
for months. The perfection of the burned,
how pure it is: no place to stay, no place
to start again.

© Mark Simpson

The Smoke of August

by Mark Simpson

From Canary Summer 2024

It begins like dusk arriving on city streets
in the way country roads digress
to fields of stubble, or farther, to a sea.
It slides through trees, lingering.
It rubs itself against leaves and stems and becomes
itself not a night or day but a sleep, a thing
that comes and sleeps.

The air is tedious with a light made yellow
by the air. It seems peaceful then, brings a sound
almost there, beneath the breath,
remembered like a childhood prayer.

This thing we’ve made makes our
going cautious, although we do not see
beyond the hills. The hills themselves
we remember as always there, like a universe
or a grocery store with shelves once stocked
richly in colors we adored.