The Beast, Faltering or Flaming …
After John Vaillant’s Fire Weather
![](/images/made/varimages/articles/_resized/KelownaFires_Deshoots_JulianDeSchutter_cropped_1400_787_90_s_c1.jpeg)
Smoke and flames billow over the hills of Kelowna during the 2023 fires that started in McDougall Creek on August 15, 2023 and spread into West Kelowna, resulting in a state of emergency. Source: @deschoots /X
Pipelines long enough to reach the Moon
and fulfill a honeymoon’s desire, or to Mars
to serve warlike places, as we wrap Earth’s
waist twice round strangulating green swaths
on her beautiful gown as seen by an astronaut
from outer space, who wonders … these black
blobs, indecent spilled on Earth’s lap
and on her white shoulder, too
Bulldozers and rock-crushers tall as skyscrapers
edge high as Nimrod’s tower
where hard workers speak in many tongues
but babble after raw whiskey or rum
and Mary Jane’s or cocaine’s let-down
after many weeks-long, 12-hour shifts …
and so Lucifer fell from heaven
(and Icarus from an Apollonian sky)
wearing his blazing colours, as proud workers
wear their trade shirts, Suncor or Sunoco
tough men and ladies and others driving SUVs
and half-tons over the icy moonscape of winter
or motorcycles roaring down hot asphalt roads
over squishy muskeg in red-hot summer
that makes these Prometheans near to gods
while they work hard for – not steal! – not fire
but fire’s fuel, produce energy enough to make
a pleasure dome with a steamy hot tub when it’s 40
below or an ice rink when new temperatures
reach 40 above …
You have to salute these top-industrious
overreaching ones who can wrest a cup of ambrosia
from a garden bed of bitch-hard quartz
bedrock when – if only they’d been born! –
50 million years ago an oleaginous river flowed
clear as maple syrup …
A hot planet, with a space-heated ice cap
melting like ice cream,
as Zeus points a lazy finger
at a boreal black spruce
browning reddish in an early-summer spring,
and the red beast inhales winds of conflicting
temperatures, seasonal or in flux, and breathes out
incarnate in his flaming glory….
Pipelines over earth’s girth swing past Mars
filled with the mightily metamorphosed elixir
… as dark shoulders move in the dark
and leaders with weevil faces
rise in the new spotlight
to declare war …
Missiles’ plumed lightning in the night
and neighbour vineyards blasted black
to a forest of crucifixes as the black-gold sludges
forward
to make faraway movers and influencers
rich as they watch the shatter-show EXPLODE
on bright screens … distracted in the absolute black
and white of the moment from the red beast
gaining momentum…
Meanwhile a politician in a heated building
with cold feet before a meeting decides
the pipelines serve a purpose
to make humankind great (or comfortable)
or maybe they don’t, with the beast’s
heavy breathing getting
out of hand. Or, in all fairness
with a hot forehead in an air-conditioned place
decides he’ll consult the beast’s popularity
in the oracle-polls.