Kai Carlson-Wee
Spider Gap
Fires continue to burn on the Tinpan.
Smoke lifting out of the trees
and a layer of fog lifting out of the smoke.
Standing on the peak of Mount Fernow
the fires are ecstatic and miniature,
two more valleys to the west.
I imagine a bear trying to muscle its way
through the baked alders, blinded and hairless,
hiding itself in the creek.
The crown of a Douglas Fir, flaring up suddenly,
shoots off its head from the heat,
burning roman-candle-like in the hard wind.
I watch through binoculars,
still on my way to the basins of Glacier,
the side of the crest where they get more rain.
I swear I have dreamt of this fire.
Now I am standing here
watching the ashes collect on my arm.
Returning to the girl who sometimes loves me,
sometimes disappears in the dark clouds
of Eastern Wenatchee.
Counting her chips in a County house,
driving the enemy into her arm.
In the dream,
I was able to stand in the fire,
pass my hand right through the flame.
It was nothing like this.
House
The room we have the sessions in is bleak.
An old suburban mall with Chuck E Cheese
and Hardees in the court. He says so tell me
how you’re doing with the drugs. Still getting
sleep? I say I wasn’t but I was. You mean
you’re waking up again? I try to tell him
what I mean but nothing works. He looks
distracted at the face above my face,
a dark Picasso print with different angled
eyes. You said the feeling was a little
like a dream. Not like a dream I say but
something like a void. Like hearing voices
in a Sheetrock wall. Peeling back the mattress
in your grandmother’s basement. The sadness
of dogs on the beach in Bolinas. The sudden
transcendence of rain. The way a word
configures a world in time, alters the end
of a poem you’ve always known, traveling
back in the fourth dimension to speak
to your childhood self. The way the smell
of her body becomes you––eternal grass, vetiver,
skullcap, rose. The way the neighborhood
seems to permanently shift once you notice
the light in a midnight house looks vaguely
like a face––clownish, obtuse––and it becomes
impossible to unsee the open mouths, tall
rectangular eyes, the TV somewhere deep
inside them, shining. The vision dissolves
but the feeling goes on like this, rearranging
itself in the past, so that for the rest of your life,
every time you travel back home, arriving late
on the east-bound departure, exiting the Uber,
hauling your bags up the front porch steps,
you enter a house in which you are loved
and are simultaneously swallowed alive.