Predator eye honed, since turning BB-gun-five, to its feathered edge, I catch the ruffed grouse flashing its neon-red failure to blend into the November gray- black bed of quaking aspen leaves matching the bird’s mottled jacket not quite exactly. It cocks its head, eyes me up and down, crouches, stretches, sets sleek-plumed for the raucous launch that trips...
Along the trail I think how risky the venture, the signs that say don’t go alone into bear country. I can see miles except in aspen. Walking uphill in sage I think of Yellow Woman, of the stranger who finds her and takes her into another life. It’s after that,...
Some days clouds drift over the canyon, horsetails, bits of high cotton. In the afternoon, then, the sky quickens, tumbles — a dark creek crashing down the mountain. Other days from ridge to ridge there’s only a high, dry, guileless blue, and you can fairly hear the meadow grass breathe. You could say, I...
As a consequence of moving forward The river bottom stirred, unwound, then circled your ankles downstream. I had to wrap my fingers around either side of hawthorn to steady against spring run-off. Stoneflies broke into shaky flight. I laid orange peels beside their split, grey husks. Lost sight of you mending into a...
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"]...
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...
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...
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...
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....