Last night the fire engines raced up the mountain.
One, two, three, four.
Through our open windows we hear them.
We watch for smoke, sniff the darkening twilight.
That many fire engines, something
is happening or is about to.

We remember the October when Oakland burned.
Another October rocked the Bay, leaving
the Marina District in flames, tearing up
bridges & stopping the World Series in its tracks.

You just out of surgery, shouting:
It’s the big one!
Grabbing your saline drip as it rolled
with the shaking. We brought wine 
and watched October’s carnage on the TV
at the foot of your bed, 
small and unreal as an episode 
of Law and Order.

This time the engines return before dawn
no embers in their wake,
no smoke in the air. 
False Alarm, we say, this time. 
Everyone has cleared their defensible space.
The firebreaks have done their job.

This October we toast the miracle of life.
That we survived, that no fires spark
swift as bats flitting across the night sky.
That babies sleep and forest animals return
to their autumn rut safe among the shelter 
of the flame red trees.
                        

My friend’s sister & her husband share 
a queen size bed in a nursing home  
they were lucky to find 
in their small North Dakota town 
when they were dying in separate hospitals  
and calling out for each other   
 
It surprised the family when my friend’s sister
got cancer in multiple parts of her body,
bones, organs, skin, 
and everything between.     

Another surprise when her sister’s husband 
was suddenly struck with heart failure 
at practically the same time.
 
They are seventy-nine, the age
my mother was when she died 
calling out for “coffee.”
And the age my husband will be  
on his next birthday.

We are fit as teenagers or so 
we would like to believe & yet
we harbor our own death  
somewhere in a secret part of our bodies,  
an unseen organ that hides its face  
as we hide ours from the dangers 
we have all learned to fear:

tomorrow’s deadly pandemic,   
runaway bus or supermarket  
terror in the afternoon.