It will be better, our friend said,
           to just accept that everything
is gone—as though lightening
            with that expression

the weight of each breathless
            click throughout the evening,
as on a map we watched
            her apartment standing

right beyond the fire’s red
            line but never crossing
in. As if after evacuating
            the home, one next empties

hope. I wished for
            this capacity myself—not
the scope, but to answer
            my own dumb little

wishes—that, running
            through the nearly empty
coffee shop to the back
            bathroom (my daughter

in the midst of a playground
            accident), we weren’t just
dashing through the scene
            of a past life: in this place,

for hours, I sat. Breathed.
            A week after the fires, miles
south, my throat still tinged
            with the lingering

smoke—I couldn’t tell
            which problem I had.
I was looking for anything
            I could let go—even

the tumbleweed snapped
            by wind from the wide bush
of baby’s breath in our
            garden, the one I just

could not bring myself to
            cut back this year. It caught
in the fence, the tumbler,
            and later, curious, I gathered

it again, wrenching the brittle
            branches free of their
own tips, now held down
            by ice. No longer a full head

of white—a little creature
            of pods, each clinging to thin
branches brushed back from
            the main line—as though

the wind shocked it, slicked
            back and stiff. Now what,
I wondered, are you going to do
            with this. Toss it back in

the snow, out of the inn?
            Fold it under the heavy black
eyelid of the alley can?
            Nothing seemed to match

the ceremony of its own
            unkemptness. I didn’t even
let it sit on the rug. This is
            so weird, said my wife, by which

I think she meant that love is
            unpredictable or maybe that
I should take my branch
            back outside. I was delaying

what surely would come, but
            for now, it both was and was
not—the state in which we
            waited, tossing out the cheap

decoys of dominoes, puzzles,
            as if counting would ward off
the fire’s progress. The eight
            clean glasses placed upside

down on the shelf so as not
            to fill with dust; the hemispheres
of bread torn for soup. How
            both languages, plenty and loss,

sit like warm stones in our
            mouths. And how each,
regardless, emerges whole.
            In the morning, the table

bore a note, where a human
            once had been: I’m sorry,
she said, to disappear so early—but
            I just have to know.


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