Loretta Clodfelter




     from Don't Panic





No one talks much about the convenient truths, the little lies we tell ourselves to smooth things over, make everything right with our psyches. This pact I made with him, not to push too hard or question, and in return he stayed.





Thinking about wildfire again, the ash heavy in the air and drifting like snow across the fields, a lightning storm or a cigarette or a car parked over dry grass and it only takes a spark, the movement a neon sign of meaning and maybes. Now we are forced to reconsider our role in this house, this canyon, this planet spinning in a distant arm of a galaxy spiraling, and I might remember the history of interaction between living things and their surroundings. And though I thought I heard your voice, in truth it was just the wind or the freeway, the distant laughter of a man getting off the bus.





Learning how scorpions can feel vibrations in the earth, processing information and eating mealworms for their prey, the movement a neon sign still flashing after the no has been lit, hunting in the desert at night, a tail coiled and whiplike. A patchwork approach to living with threats of danger, the terror alerts, the avian flu warnings, the risk of climate change. How her enthusiasm remains unabated, time itself has become undone: all my life I’ve waited for this moment.





Look right. Does this fascination with disasters, particularly natural ones, speak of some expectation of divine retribution, an apocalyptic vision of events, this faith in global warming going hand in hand with the belief that the coming climatic, climactic Armageddon is our just deserts? Three white crosses on a hill and wildfire again Tuesday.





We talk a lot about what could happen tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, so much talk that it becomes cliché, and I’m still waiting for your instructions, I don’t know how to operate this machine, all my life I’ve waited, the listless waiting of waiting rooms, and this moment is fast approaching, this future of heat and flood and unpredictability, what we used to call hope has become resignation and our actions are just another feedback loop still looping through the train.






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