Switched planes at Tokyo Bay for New York,                crossed the Bering Sea,                                  then entered North American airspace,Amid the whoosh of the wings and the smoking trails,I looked down and saw vast snow-covered mountains and glaciers. . .A never-before-beheld spectacle,The earth strangely cold. . .“You’re lucky, you took the polar route,Otherwise you’d only see smoke filled sky.Southern California, it’s a nightmare–The residents of Santa Monica have been evacuated,Not far from where Brecht lived in exile, you know. . .”O, Bertolt Brecht!Fleeing from smoke to smoke.As you anxiously gauged the blaze and wind direction,We flew over Hokkaido to AlaskaAs if returning to the ice age.Taking an ice-cold Sapporo beer the JAL stewardess handed me,I recalled Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country,Do you know how it ends?It ends in a conflagration.O, fire and ice.The fire and ice of this world!You’re right, that Buddhist sutra you mentioned is startling–“We live in a burning house.”*The liberated one comes from the snow country, offering himself tothe void.The helpless offer prayers.The eyes of the beholders, though high above the skyAre scorched by flames.No one is lucky.No one can pull out their hair and go to heaven.Tongues of fire lick all our homes,The thick smoke seeks to suffocates us.(The wild hare with a burned ear hopped intoA poem by Elizabeth Bishop.)**And I lift my eyes again–A half-naked glacier below the plane,The white patch farther off is Greenland,Almost the far side of the earth, on the edgeOf an imperial dream.And I’m strapped in my seat.And the firemen are under the waves of the fireRunning through the smoke.Are your eyes also a conflagration?***Must I write another marginal poem about glaciers?My path forever seems to goThrough fire and ice.                                                                   January 25, 2025                                                                   New YorkNotes* See chapter 3 of the Lotus Sutra** See Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Armadillo”.***See Mu Dan’s Eight Poems, 1, “Your Eyes Have Seen this Conflagration.”