In a way I love them best like this—bleached of spring
green, grass gone golden—though I pray a stray spark,
a careless or willful human does not ignite them,

these old oaks sentinels solid and silent on undulating
earth under clear blue skies, clouds stuttering by.
They looked like this four decades ago when I first

drove this windy road one tepid fall, to stop atop
the dam and look up at the dry hills, before the rains
plumped them into emerald carpets again.

The next summer, accompanying a photographer
into this same landscape charcoal’d beyond my
recognition, I met firefighters hosing hot spots.

Coulda been worse, one said. We’ve seen bigger.
This before we’d heard the phrase climate change,
before we learned about our rapidly warming globe.

And now, in a new century, admiring the landscape,
I remember young men with dirt-smeared faces
shoveling ash’d earth, saying, It happens. Fire.

And I whisper, Take care, as if the hills and trees
can do anything but bear up under whatever
comes, as if, with my fervent wishes, I can

somehow keep them safe.