Martha Silano will be reading at Cascadia Magazine’s Evening of Words + Ideas at the Rendezvous Jewlebox Theater in Seattle at 7 pm, Friday Sept. 13. More details here.

.

we entered ancient forest: grand fir, mountain hemlock,

silver fir. On the forest floor we found the familiar:

wild ginger, twayblade, oak fern, bedstraw.

There was bunchberry, too, and twisted stalk, endless

.

thickets of red huckleberry, the trail overgrown,

sodden. Bracken fern, salal. As we climbed toward

Fall Peak en route to Top Lake, we entered

a blackness not mentioned in the book. When

.

had it happened: 2014? The year before?

Singed bark sloughed off in thick, dark sheets.

Not spooky or ghostly or haunting. It was more

like reverence. Here was the lecture on succession,

.

on fire suppression’s unforeseen consequence,

on the ways of those who tended the land before

white settlers arrived, those who knew the dangers

of letting the underbrush grow thick. An ecology textbook

.

brought to life, though brought to death is more precise,

though only the firs, the maidenhair and Queens Cup,

had lost their lives; the path now cleared for regrowth,

the canopy opened for seedlings. Even while

.

it was burning, it hadn’t been dead. Roots survived,

animals hid, then surfaced, brought uncharred soil

to the duff. Seeds had already taken hold in the ash,

begun to sprout. Acres of fireweed signaling disturbance,

.

the first seer. By now my partner far ahead, while I

lingered behind, listened to the tapping of a woodpecker,

another crash of bark from a wind-tossed snag. Took in

completely the botched message of Smokey the Bear.

.

Soon, but not as soon as we’d imagined, only a few trees

that had been licked by flames, scorched by winds

that had shifted. Lushness returned. Lousewort,

valerian, bistort. Likely, a lightning strike left to burn

.

because humans don’t live here, because there’s

so much fuel. Must’ve been the year before last,

one of the hottest on record. Firefighters built

a line it didn’t cross. The wind died down, the fall rains

.

doused it. All conjecture as we headed down, farther

and farther from having to see it, smell it, make up stories

of how it came and went. Out of the pitch, where we’d been forced

to confront it. All attempts to keep it from happening a mistake.

.



Photo credits: all photos by Langdon Cook.

Martha Silano is the author of five poetry books, including Gravity Assist (forthcoming March 2019), The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, and Reckless Lovely, all from Saturnalia Books. She also co-authored, with Kelli Russell Agodon, The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice. Her poems have appeared in Paris Review, Poetry, and American Poetry Review, among others. Martha teaches at Bellevue College, near her home in Seattle, WA. Follow her on Twitter at @marthasilano.