anna, nick & i spent a lovely weekend at lake tahoe.  this is our third or fourth year [i can't remember when or how we started this nearly annual tradition] renting a cabin at camp richardson in south lake tahoe.  it was a lovely friday & saturday holiday.  the weather was sunny & pretty warm for this time of year.  the general store sold all sorts of camp richardson merchandise including t-shirts & hoodies with 1970s style rainbows iconography with the name 'camp rich' emblazoned.  that's my name!  i said to nick & anna who yawned at my joke.  or kinda joke.  rich is my name.  so is richard.  so is bo.  i have so many names that the only one i really know is the name anna calls me.

we are living in very weird days.  we counted 8 dead deer carcasses on the side of the highway on the way home.  normally, we don't see even one.  we traveled on highway 50 up the mountain & back.  we saw vast vast tracts of forest burned to cinders because of the caldor fire.  anna took some pics but the photographs do not show the massive horror of that fire.  we live in california.  we've lived in northern california for all of our lives.  we have not seen such apocalyptic fires in our 50+ years on this planet.  

i don't know what correlation the dead deer have in relation to the blasted mountainsides of the caldor fire.  or if anything related to the relative high temperatures of a mid-november northern california day.  anna asked if i can write a poem about the apocalypse.  not as one single cataclysmic event but a motion of waves.  the end of our world is not one single thing but a great many things that happen over time.  you notice them once you are in the teeth of them.  i thought of the russian poet anna akhmatova who was asked if her poetry could meet her own extraordinary time.  

i'm not comparing my own task & life to a very great poet.  but these are very strange days.  i am no great thinker.  indead, i'm pretty fucking dumb.  poetry - art - is free to do anything it damn well likes.  including noticing that wildfires in my home are now apocalyptic.  & the world i knew is gone & is currently changing into i don't know what.  & i think & believe that art must be up to the task of our days.  other than that, i shall use the phrase that the polish poet & nobel laureate, wislawa szymborska, used & titled her nobel lecture 'i don't know.'