Bull Run Fire

Five miles east
wind in my face
and the fire plume,
a violet volcano

Five miles east, but close enough,
the white wash coat of burned juniper
forcing the Saturn in the nostrils,
Hackberry Mountain, fizzling out
in a downpour, monsoon downdrafts
blowing ash into a many shouldered beast

We went home and made a list
of what we would need when
the call for evacuation came,
craving a disaster to bring
the memory awake, the dreaming down.

Great thin-legged clouds spiderwalk
their way across the purple ridge,
purple with weather; precious things
shake in their cupboards, forgotten.

Lightning pounds the mesas,
the wind pushing down in atomic bundles
of white orange flasks of violence,
a curtain on the sun, a dirty window of light,
a blowout of compressed desires
pressing the sky, re-animating us.