Dragon
Fire
Winter Fire, southern Oregon
July
2002
We were mopping up burning stumps
along the line where crews before us –
and a shift in the wind –
had stopped the fire the day before.
Just inside the green, Derek
scuffed with his boot
the brittle twigs and resinous
fir and tamarack needles
on the forest floor. “You could
light this stuff
with a popcorn fart,” he said in
his Oklahoma twang.
A large event caught our
attention.
Its effect was like that of some
great sound,
though there was no noise but our
tools
and voices.
We both looked to the west, where
the evening sky was exploding:
swift billows
of gray/white smoke obscured the
sun, which then
turned them red as they boiled
across the horizon. Other colors
came.
We stopped work and stood,
staring, mouths open.
“Toolbox is cookin’,” I said,
naming the fire
that would join with this one a
few days hence.
Sun and wind hammered clouds and
smoke into
the greatest dragon the world has
ever known.
Its scales were orange and black
and purple,
with arc-welder yellow glinting
along its back, making a fiery
outline
against the blackening western
sky.
Each color pulsated from the
violence
within the mass. Then the dragon
convulsed
mightily, snapping its own spine
and screaming a scream not of
sound,
but a scream of heat
a scream of shape
a great, world-wide scream
of writhing black and red and
orange and purple and
molten-metal yellow against the
indigo sky beyond.
A wind on quick feet
scooted out of the North
and slapped the dragon from the
sky,
leaving only streaks
of ordinary cloud.
“You see some pretty strange shit
out here,”
Derek said as we went back to
swinging our Pulaskis
at smoldering stumps, and
wondering if
anyone else had seen
the dragon, or if it had been
a private show.
©Dean Metcalf 2002,
August 3, 2007
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