pyroclastic ovenbird I walk beneath a sky murky with the memory of volcanic catastrophe. Last night a strong easterly wind scooped dormant ash from the lap of Mount Saint Helens into its hand and threw it into the face of the sun. Now my lungs ache and forty-five year old sediment lands like snow on my eyelashes. I breathe in the remains of a day: May 18, 1980, when the eruption and resulting landslide claimed fifty-seven lives. History isn’t dead, and it won’t stay in the past, it sprouts wings and swarms like locusts, darkening the reluctant morning. I cough, choking on a story that slipped onto the earth three years before I did, an older sibling born broken with a molten core of rage. Given the choice I’ll take a phreatic eruption over the superheated hate being spewed into this world every day. A volcano, at least, doesn’t discriminate, and we’ve yet to develop a filter fine enough to sequester vitriol. I take a raspy breath and watch the ash settle on the ground at my feet. 250917 ... ovenbird Addendum: By the afternoon the news reports had already been proven wrong. It wasn’t volcanic ash, after all, that filled the sky, just run of the mill wildfire smoke. The ash from Washington didn’t make it this far. So my blathe is based on a lie, which is unfortunate, because volcanic ash was more poetic than wildfire smoke, but for the sake of transparency, the above should now be considered fiction. 250917 ... epitome of incomprehensibility (Given how small air particles are, we're probably breathing in bits of far-off history and geography all the time. That said, it's good to be transparent sometimes - I hope the air gets more like that too!) 250918 what's it to you? who go blather from