And so we burn one last September ghost. The smoke is haunting me again. Tendrils of it slither up through tinder. I blow them back into mossy flagstone cracks. Around us, the rotting boards sag in horror. Even the kindling here, cut and stacked, deserves the flame. 

I catch the fir boughs first. They arrived first, too, to Stuart Island, the big trunks falling from Oil City to Port Angeles, trees floating in envoys of a skeletal dream, roots bleached and groping until each visited enough shores to break away the beauty. See how the woody fingers steam, bark boiling with the salt. Your family cured the same salt to cook, can, and jar. They farmed madness in these lonely fields behind us, here in the shadowed vales, where the crackling spice of veal, salmon and saliva return in every filament of fire. Up high in the black moss, the dark grass, up on the dim bluffs, your father waved great immolations of these needled branches to the sky, not to protect crews as claimed in cases and corroborations, but instead to lure them towards false promise of a safe port. The caretaker only named you for his day trade, sister.

By night he mashed masts into the same pulp we now ignite. And his favorite rocks wrecked my father West—West of this bank—West of the Whidbey madrones we called home. I still hear in wood snaps how our fishing hull cracked there against sandstone stained in scrawling cormorant crap, each new shriek silenced by the next wet boom and the gale’s furious whirring. The sky can be a eulogy as well as a stone. And wind is better than a tomb for falsifying past—in my memory only black water washes me from bed. None of my family survived to say why I lodged alone among these rocks. None of my first, at least. Yours did. And they raised me by the red glades of these trunks, swallows sleeping round us on the roots, while in the gnarled eyes of the wasting burls I dreamed of retching out the sea. Only ravens gossiped about murder, then.

But today maple soot caches elevate through my lashes and lips—and I protect new crews with what you whispered one day, lost sister. They lie. We sent your family to die. My, these embers glitter like your eyes littered each false story, year after year, till your last letter told the true crimes. I read your ink in this same whisper. And ever remains in me the first line ‘We sunk your father’s ship with a fire in a storm.’ You were too young to know. But with that line you still sank yourself, sunk your father to a whiskey grave when he chased you off the cliff, sink again through each clear dawn ripple rising through the sky, sink in the gnashing undertow with you both below, sink with every needle grown and yet to brown and swirl beneath and around, sink that I may finally kiss creased pages to mist in these roasting trunks, sink slowly, friend.

You drowned in July.

But in September I still follow your musing torch to the edge.

And here in the moons gloom rung and rings the widening valley of a sea stretched near from Canada to Mars. This spectral, alien gulf contains every wave ever warped and yet to wrinkle in the beckoning graveyard of our eternal ocean. And your letter prose still shows who left me for the crows—I only transmute her into poetic clothes to save my mind from tragedy. For this ledge still knows where you stepped outwards into a fresh cackle from the gulls, dress widening like soaked sails woven from the pillows of drowned judges gazing up. Better your only casket remains a gavel for your father, a case closed on the same hinges as the acorn lockets we lost here as childhood lovers, our myths unwed on these heirloom orchard benches.

Yes, the carved cedar of this home still traps in her fiery corpse some new notes from your chaotic, careful serenade. And soon that smell too may add to the senescent burn of what last carved shakes remain here to mark the garden and the drooping walls. Abandon not the roots singed beneath us, guilty stepsister of lost family, daughter of a man who murdered mine. May we both guard this latest trial in your nighthawk symposium, surveying these flickering shale cliffs till they forget their sorrow, as you warned me, long before you chose a bed of kelp.

Farewell, my friend.

Farewell and know only that that same handwriting that you left me one morning in a lighthouse closed a jury for us today. Your father dead, your family scatters now to every valley of the Earth. And I am given land that I will never keep. As small thanks I will build a sailboat from what wood remains of your old home after this fire. May we name her after you, Warden.

Originally published in In Parentheses Magazine; Volume 8, Issue 3 ($21).

Amazon eBook ($1)