musée mia burrus

The Trees Aflame (blog? prose poem? both?)

How can I write of anything but the visual on these perfect
 and perfectly benign autumn days?  The soft sky and
 summer air, from who knows where, sooth the mind, distract
 me from the bone-dry ground, release my eyes from the
 page to drift among the sudden reds and unexpected
 umbers.  The ivies, yes, even the poison ones, glow in deep
 and bright colours unimagined mere weeks ago.
 
I walk this One Acre Wood and stop to smile at a perfect
 brilliant curl of birchbark on the forest floor, bubbles of neon
 slime mold at the base of a snag, bursting pink in the
 slowest slow motion, even the inky scat I guess to be left by
 the resident skunk.  But, oh the pines!  Such yellow I have
 not seen in them before.  The needles fall like rain, like
 pointed barbs about the drought, the bigger unpredictability
 of Anthropocene, our heedless ways with earth and all who
 share this sacred space.
 
California comes to mind.  When will you burn, you aging
 pines, if burn you must some day?  
 
The maples are already famously aflame, but we do love
 death in those lovely leaves.