Forest Fires and The Poetry of Asking for Forgiveness

A bit of confluence - funny how that happens when we get mornings off . . .

I write a lot about bigger and littler confluences – those moments when a few different things I have marinating in my head all come together in an insightful way. Usually they sort of come as a surprise, with somebody or something reaching out to me from the mists and not really answering but adding something to a question I’ve been mulling. These confluences are signs that people are out there on their own thinking about the same stuff, of course, but I also like to see them as moments where we’re connecting - talking to each other in quiet ways that we only notice when we’re open to it.

This kind of thing happens most with people I love. My wife and I frequently simultaneously text each other in the middle of the day about something we’re both thinking about. I’ll be hashing through something with one of our kids or a community project or how to help a student who is walking through a rough patch, and she’ll just send me an odd note or a link to something she read or a quick blurb about some insight she had from the clinic or a picture from some social media-generated memory, and the connection will just fall into my lap. That’s a nice way to know that you’re all entangled with someone else, right?

But it also happens a lot when I’m reading, which is really interesting because I’m not all tangled up with those people – at least not in the ways that I am with Nicole – but their words come at me in just the right way at just the right moment and I feel that connection. It reminds me that I’m not one little mind stuck in the haze. At least there are lots of us wandering around in here!

Anyway, that happened to me a bit this morning when I opened up my email and read this week’s Rattle Poets Respond poem. Rose Lennard’s “LA Is Burning, Countries Are at War, and I Am So Damn Grateful for My Shower” spins the daily activities that bring the small moments of comfort and joy together with the broader systemic horrors that are happening elsewhere and – more often than we want to admit – help to make those joys and comforts possible.

Lennard’s poem is a prayer of thanksgiving and an apology all at once, praising the steaming and cooling showers that clean us, wake us up, and offer us delightful moments to fuck. And after the waters gave us all this life:

And the water ran and ran and ran,
it obeyed the rules of water: to find
its own level, to dissolve, carry, deposit.
It took our chemicals and waste, and lo,
it whisked them to a place the people
called away. And maybe god also said, let there be
sewage farms, and factories to turn out boilers
and pipes and flanged rubber seals,
and nodding donkeys sucking oil out
of desert sands, and let there be plumbers
and designers and people packing marble tesserae
into crates, and yes, let there be politicians
telling us we have a god-given right
to use as much of this goddamn planet
as our squeaky-clean fingers can grip;

It’s a wonderful condemnation. By the end, the waters have flown through so much joy and destruction that they cry out, asking why God has forsaken them.

It’s a poem about the waste and destruction we’re seeing in the world, but it’s also conscious of the long long pipes those waters have to travel – of the many many sources feeding that overflowing reservoir of muck.

For my own Poets Respond poem this week (which I didn’t finish because I couldn’t find the connections), I was thinking about climate and fires and the destruction we’re doing together. I was working with the image of my backyard, where this time of year I often burn off the bits of our old Christmas tree, partially to get some ash that I can spread in the so-so soil left behind from past decades of my house being a rental property, but mostly just to get rid of the tree and because lighting a fire in this dark time of year feels good.

I was playing around with the moment the tree goes on and goes up like a bomb. Have you ever seen a dry Christmas tree on fire? It’s terrifying and beautiful and smells absolutely divine. I tried to compare it to the moment my grandpa was blown up in a workplace accident when some jackass dropped an acetylene torch near a gas tank. Before he came back to us, my grandpa had a near-death experience and – maybe as part of that and maybe just because he probably had made enough of his own mistakes in life – he was always sort of shruggy about the guy who almost killed him. I don’t know that I heard him say that he “forgave” him, but it was just something that happened as far as my grandpa was concerned.

In the moment where I was seeing myself standing there burning off yard scrap, thinking about the thick fires eating LA and the connections between my little dumbass carbon footprint and the whole shebang, I know I was trying to pull everything together to earn myself a little forgiveness from the earth, which my grandpa has gone back to now. I’m no more or less of a jackass than the guy who blew him up all those years ago, after all.

Now don’t get me wrong – that kind of self-deprecating guilt is good. While we suck our teeth at the terrible people, it’s important to step over to the mirror and give ourselves a good bit of scowl too.

But Lennard’s poem gave me a different image today – the path of the water going from the joys of life to the final moment where it has passed through every disgusting touch of human industry is a two-way street. When we find ourselves at a gross moment where we can look at LA burning (for instance) and see – really see – the destruction we’re part of, it’s worth traveling backwards and thinking about all the pipes that brought us here.

That’s something that I’ve been having trouble thinking about during this bout of fires, but when I do, it gives me this uncomfortable sense that the answers aren’t ones that people want to consider. Lennard prays, near the end of her poem, that the water can escape from the mess we’ve made:

Let the water run off asphalt and concrete,
let it run to the ocean to try to forget
all it has seen and all it has swallowed

And it occurs to me that, while the water pours on the fires out west and everything in one of our great cities burns away and disappears, the water will run through and find its way down into the earth or through the canals and make its way to the ocean, and do everything it can to forget LA.

And I wonder if that isn’t part of the answer – part of the moment of asking for forgiveness. Do we look at the unsustainable things we’ve built and say that they just don’t work, we’re sorry, and back away? Do we stop draining the Colorado River Basin dry like we do now, just to grow the hay necessary to feed factory-farmed livestock? Do we put even more militant controls on the Great Lakes in order to guarantee that nobody follows up on the New York Times’ suggestion that we start pumping out Lake Michigan to water the desert fields of Southern California? Do we wait until the ashes start to cool and then load up empty boxes so we can show up at the relief stations outside LA and invite our brothers and sisters to pack up the last of their things and come home with us – to move out of the desert and turn off the spigot as we leave? Do we all run off the concrete and head for the cleaner land, like the water wants to, putting what we’ve seen behind us?

Those are far-fetched ideas, to be sure, but we know they’re coming – at least in the abstract sense. For a long time now, folks talking about the impacts of climate change have been warning about the disproportionate harm to coastal and desert regions. In California specifically, we already know to expect catastrophic effects on agriculture in the next 20-30 years, if not sooner.

The thing is, lots of the folks who have been warning about the impacts of climate change on these communities are themselves living in California, though I’m pretty sure that many assumed the wealth of the state would protect them from the kinds of effects they were predicting for other regions.

But – like Lennard’s poem reminds us as the water weaves through the infrastructure we’ve created – it’s the wealth created in the state of California that is responsible for the disgusting damage further up the pipes! From the unsustainable agricultural projects nestled in near-desert regions to the water and energy guzzling AI booms of Silicon Valley, the LA fires are a creation of the whole world, but with California leading the way.

I was already thinking about all of this before sitting down to read some poetry this morning. And it’s not like Lennard brings new data to the table. But reading her work at a moment when I had so many disparate voices hissing around in my ears gave me a different kind of focus – a new way to orient while I was mulling – and it took me someplace new. That’s what I mean by a confluence. It’s when we can feel that a lot of themes are connected and it’s in that feeling – that sense of a larger point – where possibilities sprout up.