Ashes, Ashes
1
California is on fire. And the beauty of it is undeniable.
The ash content in the atmosphere creates gorgeous sunsets over the still waters of Lake Tahoe — where I stand on its northern shore considering the aperture settings on my camera, the precise amount of light to harvest through a polarized filter.
At night, I dream of ash falling from the sky.
The parts per million. Forests and plant-life reduced to cellulose, resins, starches, tannins. Hydrocarbons. Carbon dioxide. Water vapor. An entire forest lifted into the blue ether and held aloft just long enough for the sunlight to consider it once more, as if nostalgic for what once was, as if listening for the birds that sang in those high canopies, or a San Joaquin kit fox lifting its head to call on a silent god in the starfields above. Sagittarius watches on, as does the asteroid, 2212 Hephaistos, seated in a smithy of light.
*
The longest burning fire on Earth is located some two hundred miles north of Sydney, Australia, at Burning Mountain. It’s an underground coal seam fire estimated to be six thousand years old. According to legend, a widow implored one of the gods to kill her because her sadness was too great to bear. The god refused, and instead turned her to stone. It’s said that tears of fire fell from her — and that the fire pooled beneath her inside the Earth. Her figure reclines along the ridge of the mountain to this day. It is her great and enduring loss that burns century by century.
Of course, our home, Earth, rests on a mantle of molten metal. Basaltic. Andesitic. Rhyolitic. Magma. If we live long enough, and if we care enough, each of us will lie down in our own stony silence, with a pool of fire below.
*
My father’s body was transported to the crematorium during the first week of September 2015.We were told it would be a few days until the morticians could cremate him because there was a backlog of clients queued up ahead. I tried to picture the space, that small warehouse of the dead awaiting transfiguration, and an underground grotto came to mind — like the catacombs of Rome or the dusty underworld of Paris. Only this was Fresno, and so I imagined a modest-sized gallery, a few torches lighting the tableau, and the dead, of course, lying side by side, luminescent in their silence. My father, white-haired and stern-faced, surely irked by the ineptitude of work taking place around him, remaining attentive to the sound of the oven door rising open like a guillotine and sliding shut. Or maybe it resembled the inside of a bullet. Something pointed toward a god and given ignition. I imagined the lifting of bodies. The last words, sometimes. One last check for rings or false teeth or anything forged in metal before the bed glides into that final housing. Gloved hands backing away. Then the chamber’s intake of oxygen, the roar of fire muffled by sheets of metal, and the gaseous residue that lingers in the air afterward. A fire of such intensity even vapor is broken down at the molecular level and electrons pushed outward to distant shells the way planets drift further and further away from a sun that’s lost its gravitational pull.
My father’s body, singular and human, given to the air.
*
Cremation normally happens during business hours. That fact alone goes against my imagination, which pictures the practice as a duty for the graveyard shift. Instead, the ovens are brushed out and heated up as coffee percolates in the break room. The dead, wrapped in blue plastic bags, are boxed in cardboard that is taped shut and then housed on storage racks. Normally, the morticians will slide one of the boxes from the rack and onto a stainless-steel table with metal casters before wheeling it onto a scale for measurement and then on into the cremation room itself.
They wear latex gloves throughout this part of the procedure, as well as surgical masks and headgear, but once inside the cremation room they don Kevlar with aluminum backing, gloves that can withstand 1000 °F. Once the body is fully inserted into the chamber, the operator depresses a button and the outer door slides down to seal the heat within. There is a small view port, a kind of spyglass into the body’s undoing, and those who haven’t witnessed a cremation are most often captivated by what they see. It’s the beauty of the fire that draws the eye. The signature of the body stripped of form through a travail of fire. The reduction. The incineration. The disappearance. Not the metal rakes or the carbon steel bristles afterward. Not the processing station with its rotary saw blades. It’s the fire that pulls us in.
Within the confines of welded steel, jets of flame work to turn tissue and fluid and bone into ash. The temperature needs to reach between 1400-1800 °F and it often takes a little over two hours to complete this stage of the work. The bones glow in the fire. They ember and brighten. And as much as I try not to, I can’t help but imagine my father’s skull at 1600 °F with twin rivers of flame rising through the orbits of his eyes.
*
The world is trying to teach me about dying.
Something about the covalent bond, the narrative of the body inhabited by the soul.
About the canvas of dead stars burning in the heavens above.
2
I slept with your ashes the night you came home.
I knew it was morbid and pitiful, but I curled around the box and cried and talked with you and, at some point, exhausted, fell asleep.
Actually, that’s wrong. I didn’t think it was morbid or pitiful. I curled around you and held you as best I could. It made no sense at all and yet it made complete sense. The carved wooden Buddha in the corner of the room glowed in candlelight, and those small flames shifted gently from left to right as if a hand calmly passed over them, and the Buddha’s face warmed in the slow-moving waves of heat radiating from the candlelight below.
A sharp and unmistakable jab to my rib cage startled me awake. It was so sudden I found myself sitting upright, searching across the room. I had distinctly heard a voice, your voice, just before being jabbed, saying, “Get up.” I even sensed your frustration, as if you’d been trying to wake me for some time.
*
I’ve awakened to the fact that my life is on fire.
My house is on fire. The grass in the yard is made of green tongues of flame, just as the banana leaves unfurl in flame and the angel trumpet bells open in petals of fire. It’s not something I would’ve ever thought possible, not even remotely, but you get used to the heat. The window blinds ripple and furl with rays of sunlight burning through. The faucet in the sink filters a gel of fire to fill the glass I drink from as I watch the cardinals through the kitchen window. The roofing pops and cracks in fire day after day, while the yellow rain tree leans over, almost comforting, its branches flushed with songbirds.
The brightness is a different story. The glare off the windows keeps me up at night. The neighbors pause on their front doorsteps to note the natural ebb and flow of this fire, like scientists charting a coal seam blaze. The firelight reflects off other people’s faces. At the coffee shop, the barista accepts my change before observing the residue of ash it leaves on her palms, then smiles professionally while inwardly questioning how I don’t just kneel down and turn to cinders and dust right there on the spot.
I am the man on fire who lives in a house of fire. I begin to perceive a few others like me, others who pass by on the sidewalk or drive by in their cars, and there is a moment of recognition, a trail of smoke in their wake. We burn. We smolder. But there is nothing for me to learn from them, and what could I possibly say that might prove of any worth to them?
My life is on fire. Green tongues of flame burn to ash all around me.
/ / /
“Ashes, Ashes” is forthcoming in The Wild Delight of Wild Things, Alice James Books, 2023