Anew

By: Mike Cole

Think of the side of a mountain

that was burned down to dirt

and bare rock and then bathed

here and there in cast off crankcase oil

and scattered with the carcasses

of tires and the shredded body parts

of wrecks before the manzanita

and buck brush grew there again,

were again incinerated in an inferno

that made its own blow torch of wind

that melted metal and sent rubber

swirling up in twisters of black dust,

and now think of the same slope

that seems from a distant vantage

a quilt of every known and previously unknown

shade of green appliquéd with the shadows

of pines, beneath which new manzanitas

shade the broad and dark leaves of ginger

and spears of bracken fern whose sprouts

are just now uncurling from their tightly rolled tips,

and you will have some sense

of what it means for a poet

to be returned to the same place

from which he rose to do what had to be done

and feel that if he had really left

it must have been from someone else’s life.

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Mike Cole lives and writes and worries about fire in the mountains of California. His poems and other writing have appeared in the anthol-ogies Some Yosemite Poets (Scrub Jay Press) and Highway 99 (Heyday Press) and in the magazines diaphanous micro, Sideways, One Sentence Poems, Wilderness House, Wild Blue Zine, As It Ought to Be, Sublunary Review, and others.