Vox Populi
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Laure-Anne Bosselaar: Fire Season Again
The fire now climbs the mountain’s back.
A red-gray haze swirls around the setting sun,
& the skies rain acrid ashes — tiny moth wings
flickering over everything.
I shouldn’t look up at the sky like this, as if it could
hold back the blaze. As if willing the animals to outrun
the flames could make it so. Bears, mountain lions
scorched. Rabbits, foxes. Horses burned alive in barns.
And yet. It’s at this time the wren comes to the birdbath
each day — & there she is. We’ve grown accustomed
to each other: me by the tree, she a flurry, a shimmer
in & out of the water. That glad flutter of a thing.
Soon, dusk will take on her soaked shades & they’ll both
disappear into the evening. A sudden darkening. Better
take my time to go back in, watch the lizards skirr away,
& the orb weaver’s zigzag her strands.
Or better: do something & focus on it. Dust the sills,
draw curtains. Play music. Answer messages: Those fires,
they ask, are you OK? Yes, yes, I’m fine, ¬I’ll say —
astonished again at how easily I can be this way.
~~~~
~~~~~
Laure-Anne Bosselaar is a Belgian-American poet, translator, professor, and former poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California. She is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently, Lately (Sungold Editions, 2023) and These Many Rooms (Four Way Books, 2019). Her collection, Small Gods of Grief (BOA Editions), won the 2001 Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry. A New Hunger, (Ausable Press 2008) was an American Library Association Notable Book in 2008. She is the author of Artémis, a collection of French poems, published in Belgium.
Copyright 2024 Laure Anne Bosselaar
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wren comes to the birdbath
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A beautiful poem, Laure-Anne, even with its terrible burning–we had so many fires at once here in Colorado recently, and birds came down from the mountains to our feeders and bowls of water. Oh, world!
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Thank you, Laure-Anne, for that crucial turn: “And yet.” And for that little used verb, “skirr.” These are the small things that make this poem, and all good poems, larger than themselves.
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How kind of you, thank you.
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Grace notes of beauty from disaster. Love poem of “beautiful lamentation.” Tragic in its telling, keenly observing globally, then loving locally.
The silence of acres of absence becomes your “glad flutter of a [living] thing.”
thank you, Laure-Anne. joy and sorrow mix up in my spirit after reading Fire Season Again.
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Thank you — most gladly — Jim.
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My heart fluttered with “That glad flutter of a thing.” I love your poems, Laure.
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Kind of you, thank you.
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No close fires here yet this summer, but they inevitably come. And we watch the sky for ashes and hummingbirds and wrens and wonder if grandchildren will only see the ashes.
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That’s what I so deeply fear, also, Barbara…
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That glad flutter of a thing – love it. Like a moth in my chest. This poem hurts, as it should. Thank you!
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Thanks, Noelle. A good poem does create a small but pleasant pain the heart… I never thought of that before.
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Such a beautiful, perceptive poem of the “both/and” nature of poems and of life itself. This poem, at the heart of it, feels so William Blake-ian: “did He who made the Lamb make thee?”
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Thanks, Carlene!
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“that glad flutter of a thing” — this poem can be my wren today. Thank you, Laure-Anne!
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Isn’t she great?
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I thought of Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Armadillo.”
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Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!
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Stay safe, Laure-Anne! I’m glad you have that wren visiting you.
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Ah, the paradox of heartbreak and moments of joy! Beautiful poem, Laure-Anne.
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How these fires and floods and tumults of wind show us how small we are, small as the wren that visits the birdbath momentarily. Humankind has helped to make North America into a war zone. We are combatants every time we tear out natural places and things such as the lands along my drive to town someone ordered clear-cut to build new houses and condominiums…no effort to save elderly trees and keep some semblance of nature and what Wendell Berry would call “beauty.” Our “affection upon which it all turns” has become extinguished. We can only recognize ourselves and our good lives in beautiful lamentation, in the poetry of what was, and what should be.
Laure-Anne!
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Dear generous friend, thank you.
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