gathering
You watch the light turn yellow, not from newly hung curtains, but from smoke some two or three mountain ridges away; not enough particulates to make a Jacob’s ladder but enough to carry the echo of a scent. You read the daily reports, to see where lightning has struck, though acts of god and man are fairly indistinguishable in their effects. You read about masticators and skidders, about humidity and duff – all presented dryly, in the terse, spare language of incident reports and poetry. You read about the moss, the moss that should transforms trees into jolly green scribbles, that moss that is now dry, strangling and tormenting tree limbs and saplings into a twisted tableau for a game of charades someone else is playing; it forms a ladder carrying flames from floor to canopy. Yet it is the same moss that catches the light so indifferently, so benign, in that poem by Wang Wei.