Fire in the Canyon
The Nature Center, its desert-landscape courtyard with yucca and manzanita, its office, its lecture hall, its classroom and display cases, stuffed birds, and the tarantula hawk preserved and pinned for examination, all reduced to ash.
From seven leagues offshore, look: a swath of orange and yellow blazes on the horizon, a sloping mesa, poppy-covered, signaling land, una tierra de fuego, though hardly an empty wilderness, more a vast garden wild tended since time immemorial.
Though both consume oxygen, though both were set by hand (one with intention, one without), though both put the deer to flight, regardless, both fires remain distinct in how, softly and truly, each burning landscape lies on the eye:
Beneath the oaks yellow and orange flames dance slowly through the understory, clearing crowded saplings, dry twigs, and fallen leaves, singeing down grasses for their more vigorous spring return, then dying out. Gray wisps drift in the clear air.
A view through a windshield: The sun reveals a sky of darkness and smoke, the Santa Anas ride in from the Great Basin, hard gusts bending palm trees (fronds thrash and writhe), and, in the distance, the canyon glows lava-red.
Poetry: © Robert Savino Oventile 2022
Photography: © Edgar McGregor
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