Bruce Whitacre | What Is Fire to Me, or, Sailor’s Delight

What Is Fire to Me, or, Sailor’s Delight

 

 

Wood smoke lingers aboard the LA plane

that just flew down a burning West Coast;

New Mexico’s blue skies are veiled in talcum —

these warming sunsets — candescent red.

 

Facing west, we eat at a High Plains café;

the dock probes a receding reservoir’s extended shore;

cottonwood seeds blizzard pink in twilight —

these warming sunsets — simmering red.

 

Bryant Park is sticky with a strange haze;

our tongues salted with the cremated West:

lodgepole pine, mule deer, and mountain lion —

these warming sunsets — radiant red.

 

Coast to coast, the signs rain down from heaven,

launched by scarlet, canyon-scorching flames,

cataclysm of pyrocumulus sky fall —

these warning sunsets — alarming red.

 

 

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Bruce E. Whitacre’s recent publications include Hey, I’m Alive; Nine Cloud; Pensive; Diane Lockward’s third volume on craft, The Strategic Poet; and the 2022 anthology I Want to Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe. Work here was nominated for Sundress Publications’ 2020 Best of the Net Anthology. A featured poetry reader at the Forest Hills Public Library, he has read his work at Poets House, the Zen Mountain Monastery Buddhist Poetry Festival, Kew Willow Books, Lunar Walk, and other venues. He holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and has completed master workshops with Jericho Brown, Alex Dimitrov, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Mark Wunderlich. Bruce is a native of Nebraska and lives in Forest Hills, Queens, with his husband.