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Michelle Bitting: Sudden
was the fire
like a wolf at a live heart
So many things
seemed filled with intent
to be lost
but the only lasting truth was change
and if you had a limitless
life
it would be a real problem
for you
Still
I wanted to come home transformed
and be surprised by the flickering
in our radically impermanent
robes
rain-soaked
and ringed with succulents
around
a tiled patio
where you’d put the fairy lights up
The mysterious nature of it—
all our rooms
all our ash
now a form in emptiness
to visit
Life
as it really is
The inconsolable
losses
The molten
heart
~~~~
Author’s note: On January 7, 2025, our home in Pacific Palisades burned to the ground along with over 50% of the town. I have walked through and visited the area several times now. The scope of destruction is overwhelming, unfathomable. All hyperbole applies. To the Palisades and Alta Dena burn sites both. Comfort comes with community and the greater human impulses to connect, support, and create anew. Such loving, magnificent energy we’ve felt and witnessed first-hand astonishes as much as the original firestorm itself. We managed to wrest a few treasures from their crypt of cinders & ash or at least to photograph them, including the ruined beauty of my old doctoral mortar boards and 1957 Royal Quiet De Luxe typewriter.
Bio: Michelle Bitting is the author of six poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. Her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in 2024 by C & R Press. Bitting is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.
Poem and photo copyright 2025 Michelle Bitting
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A clear, beautiful, grievous poem.
“all our rooms
all our ash” 💔
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Thank you.
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Living as we do in a wild fire zone (albeit a much more rural one), this poem moves me enormously. We imagine making a run for it; we imagine the loss of, well, everything–inconsolable, for sure. But this poem regards that inconsolability and responds with “life as it really is,” which is to say, somehow we go on. That’s the essential human truth, and poems help make that clear.
Keep on, keep on.
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Thanks, Bob.
>
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Thank you so much, Robert. It means a lot to me.
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This, from your ashes, stunning, just as the grass in the photo promises renewal.
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Thank you, Marty.
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“So many things
seemed filled with intent
to be lost
but the only lasting truth was change”
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Great lines.
>
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“the fire
like a wolf at a live heart”–what a stunning beginning
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Yes, stunning.
>
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I hold you to my heart, petite Miche. Your poem “a form of emptiness” so full of “inconsolable losses”…
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Thank you, Love. I feel you.
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Empathy survives, even among cinders and ash. And the photograph: such ruined beauty. But it catches the sympathetic eye. Thanks for sharing the verbal and visual imagery. The firestorm of our time brought home.
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Well-said, Jim.
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I appreciate your response to the work, Jim!
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Michelle:
a staggering poem to imbibe this cold morning in Florida.
How even the lines seem burned down to essential words, everything otherwise—missing.
Fire has visited a true master of verse!
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Yes, the poem seems to be seared down to the essential ground.
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Wow, gosh, thank you, Sean!
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but the only lasting truth was change
Yes,
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