ALIMA AMONG THE TREES T.D. WALKER
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“She left our end of the country entirely, went up into the fir-forest on the highest slopes, and stayed there. Before we left he quite desperately longed to see her, but she would not come and he could not go.” – from Herland, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1915
A Process for Conducting a Safe and Effective Controlled Burn in Mountainous Regions
1. Determine the Area in Need of Cleanup and Restoration
How we laughed about the necklace.
How we laughed later when you'd said
you should have brought engagement rings
instead. Do you know how often circles
appear in your myths? Do you go back
to that America that you left, without
your necklace or your wife, to find
that circles are often just the illusion of circles?
That starting point spiraling down in search
of itself, that intractable broken thing.
2. Select the Appropriate Time of Year for the Burn, Taking into Consideration the Weather
Did we tell you why we grow
firs? The resin dries clear. Paper.
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You told me: you'd cut them
down for ornamentation.
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I suppose we all have our uses.
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3. Notify the Over Mothers, Foresters, and Local Residents of the Upcoming Burn
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Van told us about the Phoenix.
Jeff calls it The Firebird: the way
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your presence rises. I am not a fire
you can put out. Of what you've left
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out of all the ways your people die,
we've determined there must be more:
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a sort of self-immolation without fire,
the ashes from which can never disperse.
4. Gather the Appropriate Equipment for Conducting the Burn
I sleep in the temple now. I cannot sleep
beneath the firs' limbs, the night sky half-
obscured by their reaching. The way a wing
reaches up. A moth's wing, a plane's. My room's
ceiling covered all the stories you said were there:
constellations, asterisms, brief flitting stones.
The story you connected from our disconnection.
All of it flies away, you know. You flew,
toward me and away. Nothing can ever reach
us here in the temple, so I sleep.
5. Build Sufficient Fire Breaks to Protect the Surrounding Area
You asked us once why we kept
venomous creatures in our country. You
asked your tutor, not me. You could never
speak passion and fact in the same voice.
This is why you failed: the wasps kill their larval
prey, then take the bodies back to feed their young.
They prey they never reach adulthood, never
harm and spread and invade. You'd have me
embroider all this on a handkerchief for you?
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6. Ignite the Fires Such That They Meet in a Predetermined Area
You called me fiery. I don't believe you did
understand what fire is until you were burned
by its absence.
7. Manage the Fire, Including Appropriate Management of Smoke
Even I was patience itself with you:
every tree in a shelterbelt. What catches
the wind will have to bend to it. Only
I realised you are not the wind, just
that you share its transparency. Smoke-filled,
angry, your approach revealed itself to me
too late. I opened that windbreak to you,
broke whatever branches I could to guide you.
Oh, the same wind never returns. The trees
find their green strength among these blows.
8. Extinguish Any Remaining Smoldering Fuel
When you offered your name as a wedding
gift, I refused. You'd forget mine, you could not
pronounce it—
you could not pronounce
the names of trees, the names of morning-
calling birds. Would you have us silence them,
all the names we've created? You could not tell
each bird from bird, called one a nightingale, another
a lark. Each lark had its own song, each nightingale.
You will find another and call her wife, and call her
all the names in my language, mine, for what is destroyed
after the burning clears the forest.