To my children,
November 2019
What do you remember? Single story ranch, white with black shutters. And the garden—agapanthus, magnolia, lemon and fig trees, hyacinth bushes, and morning glory. We lived up above the sea of Los Angeles, notched into the haunches of the Santa Monica Mountains where coyotes would venture down at dusk, hungry, roaming for the wandering cat, like ours. We lived beyond our means.
We could see the vast city filling the basin like broken dishes in a sink as it bumped along the Pacific Ocean. Our home close enough that seagulls would scavenge the garbage on pick-up days. And in the fall, when the Santa Ana winds blew, it made us all a little crazy.
Robert Frost wrote “The world will end in fire.” I envision fires pummeling through the canyons and down our old road. Eucalyptus crackling. Palms exploding and houses blowing up one after the other as if bombed. Leaving blackened carcasses, dead remains of a time when we lived in an oasis in a desert and thought it was home.
November 2021
Today, driving past our old home, untouched by the fire, I wondered if the magnolia still swells the air. Then drove on, past the random skeletons of torched homes, heading toward the Getty Fire’s genesis. At the end of Tigertail Road, a charred trail snakes up through blackened trees. Yet the chaparral, sumac and sagebrush have returned, green, lit. Obscuring the smoldering city below.
After my hike, I drove to the home of people we once knew, pulled up to their gate. Through the hedge, someone on the tennis court. It could have been me, or you. I wanted to shout: remember we once loved one another? Instead, I backed away. I know this is a diversion from what I mean to say about my fear of burning hills, of burning the evidence of our existence—.
This poem first appeared as two separate poems in Glass: A Poetry Journal and December.
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Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of The Missouri Review Editors Prize in Poetry. Her third book of poetry, Tic Tic Tic, is forthcoming in 2025 from Cornerstone Press. Heidi’s the author of three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. Recent work in Agni, Image, Poetry Northwest, Terrain.org, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi holds degrees from Stanford and NYU. heidiseabornpoet.com
