Random Acts of Poetry

Missing Person

We watched it all go up:
flames gnawing your dry tinder,
eating fences, trees, your house,
spitting black beams and ash,
then moving on, hissing
insults at the material world.

After the Oakland hills exploded,
you blew away faster than the smoke,
not caring where you started over.
City in ruins or Shangri-la,
all roads would dead-end there.
You’d know it when you saw it.

In Moscow tonight, dull-eyed men
lounge in vodka stupors.
Women wear footpaths into scrubbed floors.
In Venice, the water is rising, rising.
A Rio seamstress sighs
and sews a sequin to a Harlequin mask.

Somewhere you’re breathing,
seeing these same constellations,
sipping your Chinese tea,
maybe thinking about the fire
that touched that other life,
and burned far more than you know.