secondhand memory

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Next to the freeway exit someone’s orange tent blossoms

into gray smoke. It is a Tuesday night in the city of angels

 

and on the other side of the Pacific my mother stands

on a night road outside her father’s house staring at

 

a silhouette fraying into cigarette butts. Its skin a mosaic

of red river and splintered wood. Also a car, bumper bent

 

over a signpost. What stares back are the eyes of a dog

in a photograph. The fire is a metaphor. Fire,

 

photograph, house. I, meanwhile, am hurtling towards a man

musing about his troubles to understand why the sun

 

sets red in a cloud of smoke and why I can only smell

a backyard barbecue. My mother tells me later she woke

 

to find her bed cast in brimstone and that

she doesn’t know if they ever caught the arsonist.

 

And I picture a house on fire.

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