The bright red glow of wildfire flared up
into the night, a terrible, beautiful, changing glow.
We couldn’t not look, students of fire
that we are, and I was suddenly too aware
of the dry and brittle parts of myself, places
parched as these Cimarron mountains.
How easily it can all go up.
We are asked to live this life
that can combust in an instant,
asked to pull the unstoppable into our lungs.
The glow continued to blaze, to leap up.
It burned. I could not stop watching
the tower of flame, the way it charged the night.