27 Nov Back 40: Coda
Under a winter’s worth of melting snow, Swan Lake is a fresh sheet of rice paper and the half-sunk round of larch charred from an ice fisherman’s fire the precise place the Great Poet rested her ink-wet brush momentarily before raising it, and abandoning the poem for the view.[gallery link="file" ids="10387"]...
04 Oct Back 40
Wilderness In all this American marital wasteland we could have lost everything. I’m so thankful we didn’t end up dying without having found each other, without striving to know one another more generously, not unlike scaling the face of the Beartooths where beyond the last grip of roots and shale wolverines lip the far ridge and disappear into no man’s...
25 Jul Back 40
Deep Hidden Meaning, Deep Hidden Morning, on Mute Letter by penciled letter, graphite, biting into the cellulose molecular make-up of lined notebook paper, amplifies almost too much Stratocaster guitar clamor. Window slid open, not one syllable, not one decibel, not one sixteenth note trickles through a single square of screen mesh above this desk. Insect...
08 Jun Back 40
We Are the Ones for Dezmond Waiting. A syllable: forming, generating energy in small, dark masses: marrow, stem cell, neuron. Waiting to come alive again in this tiny body. Guwa — you should learn this is the word between you and I, my son, hokshina. Come here. Come home. To this place. Between...
04 Feb Back Forty: Montana
Aspen, arrowroot, agate. Bitterroot, bear grass, barking squirrel, Camas, Clark’s nuthatch. Devil’s club. Deer Lodge, Drummond, Eye of the needle. Emigrant weeds. Finch. Fireweed. Flatbow people. Glacier lilies among gray wolves. Happy birthday, lover of Indian paintbrush while Just another June sends endless rain along the Kootenai. Of silver glaciers, Lewis’s woodpecker I sing. Lost Creek. Magpie....
01 Dec Back 40: Freezeout
How many words do the birds have for wind?...
02 Oct Back 40: Highway 89 North
It will take you there & beyond. Past the twelve thousand year old Anzick Child aglow in red ochre. Past the fallen barn praying on its knees in the basin. At the county line A ghost house looks for its people. The Ringling Church celebrates its loneliness. The depot has died. In winter the whiteouts tell you to turn back but you go on, believing you’re on...
29 Jul Back Forty: In the Two Medicine Badlands Along the Rocky Mountain Front
Poetry of the Northern Rockies...
05 Jun Back 40: Girlwise I Viewed the Prairie
Beige blue horizon and the thrill of sunset violet velvet magenta not just for seconds but minutes coming and then receding from its own brilliant apex and I hoped to have it all, the arrival, the going, but mostly I wanted to keep the fury of color in a full sky and...