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Smoke Aloft
Gary Harrison

awake to smoke haze
glazing skyview
Arizona fires

colonize cool air
pigeons scatter
from high-voltage lines

collared doves chatter
a mourning dove
pentasyllabic

calling from afar
on the horizon
sunlight splays umber

a lone siren sounds
from the freeway
sun and birds heedless

anemometer
still this morning
after last night’s wind

no cypress limbs down
patio littered
pollen-laden sprays

shards of curling bark
cluster wind-blown
in buffalo grass

dry winds lift the haze
by mid morning
triple-digit heat

thousands of acres
alight smoke aloft
and it’s just late June

—
Gary Harrison was a professor of English at the University of New Mexico for thirty years, specializing in British Romantic poetry. He is the author of Wordsworth’s Vagrant Muse (1994), the co-editor of two anthologies of World Literature, and the author of many articles on English Romantic poetry, focusing most recently upon the work of John Clare and its relation to ecological thought. Three of his recent poems appear in A Wind Blows Through Us (Mercury Heartlink, 2021), an anthology of New Mexico poetry. He currently spends his time hiking, writing poetry, and writing lyrics for music that he composes on guitar and piano.

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