Halfway through the latest phenomena, you stop to observe a small herd of black angus cattle standing in snow in a wheat field outside Ringling, Montana. It is the first day of winter, 18 below & they’ve huddled close together in a wide circle, en masse, one indivisible body warming the other....
for Peacock In the mud of the origin of Hopeful Creek, we find a paw print, wolf track, big as my fist, size of the male they found on Deer Creek this spring — a hundred seventy-nine pounds. Plenty lions there, too. A few years back some hunter shot a grizzly up Kelly Creek, said he thought...
Somewhere far, far out On the Montana plains Left in the attic Of an old stone farmhouse Hangs a broken-necked fiddle With mouse-gnawed soundboard And missing strings. I hear it most nights. The scored dirt floor below Is rutted, the windows gone There’s less and less For the walls to be concerned about To say nothing of...
The path from here must be instinctively traced each breath avowed to relational space all thought attribution all feeling atavistic The way rain and snow dance across an interval of shadow scaling in and out of form the way stars darken toward us until our struggle to see them ceases and we are secretly...
Bare branches, you were dark lead around each colored pane. You outlined every piece of winter blue, then the wet violets and gold crocuses of spring. You caged gray flocks of mourning doves, embraced the satin strips of green breaking through black dirt, cupped a cloud, scored the yellow...
The wind is a river that cannot be dammed up; it flows Through life here in this Chinook country, and you Can embrace its sound or it crazies you. It forever Funnels through that high pass to the Southwest, snaps tall evergreens And bends young saplings to the ground, brings On...
The saddle between two peaks the sleeping figure’s waist, one peak her shoulder, the other the smooth contour of her hip. She is asleep, deeply asleep. She is dreaming of the colors of flowers, the songs of birds. When she awakens she will prop herself up on one arm and stretch the other...
Which streaks the woods road at noon — Shade or sun, Across the nature of the other one? Do shadows, shapes of leaves and limbs, Take all the light And leave, except for minor errors, night? Or, is black the habit of summer sky? And flawing his blindness, Only shooting stars Behind the walker’s...
When I talk to them, they listen, sitting beside me on the road, waiting to hear their names. I look over, into their faces & they stop what it is they are doing. I tell them how it is here, making a living, living the dream, getting by with things I don’t need; how...
Your grandmother watches lodgepole and poplar scatter morning light across a scrim of dust lifted from the skin of the earth I am trying to show you how the fallen tree nearby is a fallen tree and an expression of fallenness and this expression is exact Your grandmother moves from a stillness she keeps taking each step as though...