Poems by Sara Burant

Smoke Sonnets

...burning with low to moderate intensity along the perimeter,
with creeping, smoldering and occasional torching behaviors.
~Inciweb description of the Cedar Creek fire

by Sara Burant

From Canary Fall 2024

Sara lives near the headwaters of Amazon Creek on what once was a wetland prairie in the Willamette River watershed of Western Oregon on the traditional lands of the Kalapuya people.

1
Air Quality Index 839
So we creep outside with the dogs. So we crawl
in our car to buy wine, smoldering with regret,
with longing & frustration over what’s been lost
or misplaced in our haste to be set, ready to flee:
phone charger, recipe box, Book of Changes,
our friendly face. Where are you, are they, am I
inside the smoke’s creeping unfathomable body,
its greasy stench, the ambivalence with which
it recognizes us: vapor, reek, & ash. It doesn’t
bother to care if we mask ourselves or meet it
wearing a sooty bewildered expression. We post
startling videos: the crackling orange dirges
sung by torching trees, absent views, steel-wool air,
with monstrous red cheeks the sun going down.

2
Another red flag warning
This roughed-up air chafes like trying to erase a scar
with sandpaper, the violence of self-forgetting, our
sundered, cindered bonds. Do we stay & if we go
do we take the neighborhood with us? In our mouth
the coal of a mother’s worry, in our heart a father’s
devotion, do we take the lofty unquenchable shade?
Grandmothers, do we take your aprons & sourdough,
grandfathers, your shovels & guns, the ships that
carried you from Prussia, Poland, Sweden, France?
Do we take the coltsfoot, the nettle, the uva ursi,
the salve? The fagots, the stakes, the witches & heretics
screaming as they burned? Dear smoke, if we go,
will you leave? If you leave, will we recognize
ourselves without you?

3
Late October’s need
More worrisome than midnight mail the hills
are gone again. We don’t know where we are,
in whose house, in which past or future year,
fortune’s wheel turning sideways, upside down,
taking us where it will, a doe refusing to let us
pass, harassing us with out-thrust chest, we
try but cannot read her eyes’ hieroglyphs,
so we wait for the moon to favor us with a sign
we’ll read with confidence & precision;
but we’ll need your eyes when they were winter’s
blue flames burning clear with assurance
that all will be well. When most they’re needed
the hills will come back, won’t they,
bringing their tender gravities?

4
A beach offers a kind respite
A bird pipes from inside beachgrass whose ancestor
some humans planted to stabilize the sand, the grass
so happily spreading while the sand strains to shift
the gears of its immense body—we feel it tugging,
tugging, a leashed dog who would be running after gulls,
gull-shadows & every scent wind seasons the air with,
air so replete with recollection we wheel under its touch.
Gulls turn the wheels drawing the world on, behind us
fire’s smolder & creep, before us a spellbound mist,
pelicans in frayed lines as if straining to break from
the harmony binding them. If there’s singing we have
to reach beyond hearing to grasp at its threads, waves
droning a gravity that pulls us back to a brindled dog,
taut leash, sand’s blue grit blown rough against our shins.