robert rothman
After the Forest Fire
The sullen smell still stirs in the charred remains,
scattered like bodies across a war-cursed field
studded with trunks, decapitated, armless,
shrunken, and blackened. When a breeze comes up,
smoke and ash are lifted like a gray tule fog, obscuring
the endless hills, bald but for the stick-like trees
sticking out at odd angles. Twenty days in, the heat
isn’t fully extinguished though the fire is out,
gone underground to warm the soil and the rhizomes
beneath. Everything in the world has its place
and purpose. Still, it shocks to see the seeds,
released by the 1000 degree temperature, blooming
among the dead and downed, the narrow green leaves
and brilliant red-purple flowers, pushing up
and out of the abattoir of slaughtered life. You can’t
turn away: the green stalks and fire-like petals, alive.
Flash Flood
In the dusty trail between two banks that holds
nothing, in the dry arroyo you travel day after
day, that channel of scant and can’t, the long
season of not and knot, the rush of sound,
heard at first faraway, like a train which announces
its coming by a vibration in the steel tracks, humming
faintly when ear is put to the metal, comes louder
and louder, as if the sound emanates from inside
and will burst you open, the pelting rain falling
and gathering until the narrow channel, where not
even a weed could put down roots, is inundated
and you are swept up and away, flailing to keep
head above the flood, and spit out the mud, muck
and wonder of the torrent that carries you forward.
Robert Rothman lives in Northern California, near extensive trails and open space, with the Pacific Ocean over the hill. His work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Tampa Review, Willow Review, and over one hundred twenty other literary journals in the United States, England, Ireland, Canada, Wales, and Australia. Please see his website (www.robertrothmanpoet.com) for more information about him and his work.