"Ashes Denote," by Emily Dickinson

August Fires

Smoke from Canadian fires

apricot the morning light.
Asthmatics hope for a wash
of rain or muscled breezes
off the Pacific. August

in the northern half
of our planetary melon
has ritualized fire--
images of charred houses,
cars, schools, towns,

and mountains stomp
steadily into media's flow.
I don't know, I don't know
what to to--what can I do
amdist this burning?

hans ostrom 2024

In Times of Fire

I looked at photographs

of a California wildfire. One
showed remnants of a house--
scorched black beam lying
down. In the background,

black pine trunks stripped
of limbs. Foreground: ash
and a clothes dryer & a clothes
washer, side by side, leaning
on each other, their doors
melted off. They looked

back at me like vacant
eye sockets. In the past
they churned and spun
garments a family wore
as they laughed, ate,
quarreled, slept. In this

present, a cyclone of fire
struck them, vaporized
their dwelling. Now they
seem to gaze blindly
into a hellish future.

hans ostrom 2024

It's 1954 and Emmett Kelly remembers

the Hartford, Connecticut, circus fire,
1944: the big tent went up,

and people panicked like animals,
but the big cats got strangely calm.

The famous clown rushed from
the small dressing-tent in makeup,

managed more authority than a cop
because a clown's not supposed

to speak, so when he spoke,
the wild eyed customers listened.

They let him save their lives
with a frown.  Back in his tent,

he said to Willie in the mirror,
"No show tonight. No show

in Clown Alley."  Other clowns
entered, hysterical, said who'd lived,

who hadn't. (168 hadn't.)
"You were wonderful," they told Emmett,

who had removed half of Willie's face.
As Kelly he shrugged. "I did what I could."

Now in 1954, Madison Square Garden,
Emmett's put on half of Willie's face.

He feels weary.  He tells an interviewer,
"Clowning is nothing you can study for."



hans ostrom 2017