Reset Twenty-Two, Day Ten

The blur that was Saturday is all but forgotten, and Sunday I expect to sleep through. It will probably be smoky, but maybe not as smoky as Saturday. About the only indelible image Saturday left was that the smell of smoke never lessened, but winds are supposed to shift about today. The Dixie fire expanded rapidly Friday night and Saturday morning, and is now the third largest wildfire in California history, and is still only 35% contained, a figure that, unlike the fire, has barely moved in days. Meanwhile, the River fire barely expanded, and containment there has reached 40%.

More triple digit highs are due this week, and even worse, the nights will be warming up as well. That's only the inland regions, of course. Over on the coast they are expecting fog, and highs in the sixties. Poor bastards hardly get any summer at all over there. They must be so envious.

Super tired now.




Sunday Verse

Amber

by Nick Flynn


Hover
the imagined center, our tongues
grew long to please it, licking

the walls, a chamber built of scent,

a moment followed by a lesser moment
& a hunger to return. It couldn't last. Resin

flowed glacially from wounds in the bark
pinned us in our entering
as the orchids opened wider. First,

liquid, so we swam until we couldn't.
Then it felt like sleep, the taste of nectar

still inside us. Sometimes a flower

became submerged with us. A million years
went by. A hundred. Swarm of hoverflies,
cockroach, assassin bug, all

trapped, suspended

in that moment of fullness,
a Pompeii, the mother

covering her child's head forever.