who hasn’t wished to turn a memory to smoke?

What profusion of wild flowers in hues of fire bloom
this summer—scarlet gilia, blue harebells, yellow
cinquefoil, Queen Anne’s lace—where flames
of the same incandescent colors took a forest down—
the grass scorched first, the very ground

exhausted, aspen, pines, and fir, in green armadas
on the waving hillsides, stripped and charred,
their skeletons erect still, useless masts, or fallen,
driftwood, in the wreckage. It was all (she said)
to burn a letter in a campfire. That year, the drought,

a vampire, had prowled the mountains greedily,
drying up the springs and creeks and sucking
trees with hot, consuming breath. The man she loved
had not responded as she’d wished; and so
his image had to be destroyed. Who hasn’t wished

to turn a memory to smoke? To wipe a moment,
or another being, from the world, to prove that love
is merely ash and air, by altering its tokens
in consuming chemistry, because one cannot change
oneself, or undo time, where thoughts are wisps

of nothingness, just little tropisms, but acts are stones.
Today the air is clear; the snows of recent winters
and the patient seeds have bored through soil,
and rains this season, generous with drops
of succulence, have also washed out death, as tears

long-distilled relieve regret. I do not have another fifty
years; I’ve got to take the forest as it is, half-
ruined, wishing things redone, imagining green life,
young trees, a chance to kindle a new fire in the heart—
catching, glowing steadily, burning without loss.

[Catherine Savage Brosman {1934- } '1: In the Hayman Burn' from "A Colorado Suite" in Breakwater: Poems]