Murray - Whiteout

(February 2009) There are always bodies to discover at each new disaster, in a range of states, from seeming sleep to a charred disorder. But once the inspections begin in earnest, expect this death count to escalate as the scorched landscape is closely assessed, teeth and DNA separated, filed as discrete, razed histories, aggregates of last moments and final acts, the wild fires closing in, their inverse-shadows cast by a speeding sackcloth sun; innate desire to touch, like first love, pupils aglow. Its common enough to come across pairs of bodies, dumped freight washed up in the surf, broken on the pavement beneath barely there buildings, or even camouflaged in the charcoal and atomized silicate of a brushfire, but harder to tell which vague strewn ember was once man or woman, or which was both; entwined in conjugate burning, the heat put to use and flames fanned. Falling or burning, embraced against the end; what-was-once-two closes in, supplicates, smoulders down to one corpse, crumbles, ascends.