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River of fire, river of stone
Did they look up, fox-wolves drinking the sudden
warm water? Did they even have the time
to look up at the odd glow to the east,
a second hellish sunrise, red as fire
incinerating forests? Broadleaved oaks
and ash, the lurid-leaved persimmon trees
whose fruit fattened the horses, fed the short
faced bears, leaf litter of magnolia trees
ablaze at once? The sky would have been dark
for days, the eddied stratosphere pregnant
with dust, and thin plumes of it blowing west
against the usual ocean wind, the storm
of fire stoked by a scouring blast
across the plains. Did the Eucyons flee,
or drawn by terror-stricken, injured prey
would they have chased the fire along its edge
coyote-like? (The opportunist dog
as old as Hesperocyon, 40 million
years ago.) Guile doomed Eucyon’s whelps
to leg-hold traps, to tar pits, to the leash,
so as the peccaries, pronghorn, the sloths
and rabbits ran wild-eyed and westerly,
the fox-wolves might have headed toward the fire.
No matter. They were drinking. Did the banks
glow ruddy? Did the wretched stream run dry?
The earth had opened up, and lava bled
into the Miocene Sierran streams,
ran toward the Fresno Sea. Did they look up?
That old, steep-sided river canyon might
have taken a few moments to escape.
Fish would have been turning belly up
as river water warmed, the main stem blocked
and shrinking pools filled gills with caustic ash.
They may have been distracted. When the wall
of seething rock, molten and fast, came down
the river canyon, sandbar pools in steam
subliming at its front, air crackling and the screams
of animals unable to escape
to herald it, they may have stood, eyes wide
reflecting fatal red, transfixed, and then
even the water in their veins would burn.
Who knows? The red brim-filled the rill,
burned every tree, each fish, each sprig of moss
and raptor’s nest, melted the top few feet
of gold-flaked cobble, scoured the soft rock walls
the river had incised, flowed swift until
the earth’s anger subsided, cooled, a strange
traumatic calm descended slow after
burn-out, and other fox-wolves came to eat
what meat there was, charred by the pallid fire
of trees, cool by comparison, and the new rock’s
red glow subsided over days. Rain came
and then the river, ousted from its bed
worked on the softer rock. Eucyon whelped
the wolves. The sloths died off. The salmon lost
its fangs. The land grew cold and mountainous,
ice shrouded the peaks, and fed the streams
to quarry out the rock. That river now
a long mountain, the lava all that still
remains of those old days, the canyon walls
long gone, the sea the river fed now plowed
for cotton, its flow frozen fine-grained rock,
wild oat awns nodding from its crevices,
and travelers intent on granite domes
pass by the mountain, never seeing it.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
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