☀ What Sparks Poetry: Katie Peterson on "The Fire Map"

Their symbols are single flames. Every fire
requires a pretty name—Apple, Blue Jay, Coyote.
They earned those names by starting where they did.
And you can find them if you pause the arrow
on the map, and press with your finger, but not too hard.
If you do that, you'll be sent back
to the first map, laid out in its bordered shape,
the template of the state.

That isn't what you wanted to see.
But once there, you can advance,
investigating fires from previous years, whose symbols are the same,
placed differently, on identical maps, since the terrain
hasn't changed its surface, though the water table
would tell a different story. Paradise and its shotgun canyons
a few years back, a fire in Trinity the previous that turned into a complex
(they call a fire a complex when it grows)
merging with the blaze that began
in lava beds. That perimeter
included nearly half of a national monument.
But—see!—you can no longer find those names.

Last decade's Rim Fire simply reads "contained." The symbols
turn red the year we're in. They gray them
for each year that's gone before. The current map
changes with the hour, look, the Sheep Fire
just showed up on the shadowed topography near Lassen,
where two years ago another fire raged,
south of Susanville, town named for a miner's daughter,
which didn't have a post office or bank
until three years after its name became official,
or so they teach you in school. The map says it's just 3 percent contained.
But like all numbers, these mislead,
as success isn't about amount for those who fight
but some cessation of agility—if the fire can jump,
can they keep up? A fire can burn contained
much longer than it does what it came to do.
Under these symbols, the map of California wrinkles

like a sheet on a sad bed, easy to fix, but hard to make right
when one remains preoccupied with troubles,
as the relationship that happened there caused you
to abandon the basics of care,
and has assumed a quality of being impossible
to end or heal, since getting out
means leaving for good, so you wonder,
will you be followed
for years by all you've said
and done? They colored the map
where the land deserved it. The desert shouldn't claim
everything the eye can see from space. Doesn't water
deserve a better color than white? But just as many flames live there,
in the green spaces, where mountains hold and give
the snowpack that diminishes each year—
red in the present tense, they are nearly festive, like lights on trees.

Incidents on the wane turn a darker green.
The map disappears five years after they make it.
Twelve years ago was awful—
now it's gone. You'd have to talk to someone
who lived through those fires to find out what burned.
In no year does this map record our smoke.