Cowboy
My brother says he’s a wild one, Abe.
His words ease off at their endings
and his tongue rolls back
to ponder their taste,
as if the syllables were coffee heavy with grounds.
When he takes off his baseball hat for the meal’s blessing,
his blond hair riots out from the sun flush of his face,
light against the grime behind his ear.
He’s simply satisfied with mountain work
which earns and will be earned
by a state school,
a curtain of rain before the peaks,
and a horse’s gentle nodding at a slow walk.
Salida, CO
A Morning Thought
(a morning with a blanket, coffee, and low clouds)
Time is not a currency
To be saved, invested, wasted.
Time is a mountain stream,
Always present and always new.
Try to hoard that sparkling laughter
behind a dam, and murk will stain
the flood which noses out of the banks
like a needy dog.
No. I will sit, hugging my knees,
On a sun-smoothed log which leans
Into the stream of chuckling time.
The water which I watch slip by will return in snow to the headwaters;
Can I outgive God the time he gathers up and returns,
Again and again?
Be still and watch the seeds and reflections floating the surface,
The trout and gold dust tumbling down the bed,
The water abundant
And new
And promising more.
Littleton, CO
Stargazing
In the shy, small hours two nights ago,
I wandered between blurry sleep and a blacktop
overspread with blankets and pebbles.
Meteors murmured from the dark.
My parents tore their sleep from the silence
and rolled it into spit balls of conversation,
arced their comments after the falling stars.
We made ourselves warm
on trespassed land
through hurtling suns
under the auspices of mountain lions.
I slept until the sunrise washed itself
across the misty river-paths and dry ridges,
when, like a young girl,
the morning locked its precarious glee
behind a silent smile.
Conifer, CO
South Platte Hotel
Where the North and South forks
greet each other eagerly,
link arms, and skip
down the narrowing canyon toward Strontia,
an old clapboard hotel squats in an aspen grove.
A fence now blocks the vandals and the legal liabilities
(who knows for whom
the Register of Historic Properties
preserves the place;
who knows why graffiti scrawls its disenchantment
onto the optimism of another time)
and a fading sign says a railway went through here.
One year, the tracks washed out.
The conductor earned a monument among the willows
for four hundred lives saved,
and his lost.
Other stories peer out the back windows of the second floor—
full skirts and carpet bags, rough miners,
dainty writers, dirty children.
Old hopes whisper from the shimmering aspen leaves,
old failures fade with the white paint and black lettering.
History writes itself in the blasted rock of the railway,
now returned to dirt,
now swirled in the rising river
and forgotten.
Littleton, CO
Montana
I wanted a can of tomatoes
for the red beans and rice
which would simmer on the Tundra tailgate
in a sloping alpine meadow that night.
I angled for the canned aisle,
my mind all a rush
with a speaker event in six months
and a mid-sermon email
and a delicacy for the debit card.
A lady not much older than me,
but with quieter eyes,
pulled up her cart to let me pass.
I wonder if her calm came from the slowness
of Montana tags at sunset
and high plain hay bales mid summer,
or if my scattering desires preceded
the rushed drives and long flights
which I label “home” and “fun”
and to which I deal pieces of myself.
Bozeman, MT
Sleeping Beauty
The mountains are sleeping.
They roll under a slow sunrise,
snore in grumbles of thunder through August afternoons,
and open an eyelid halfway to watch the autumn stars.
Rush on in ignorance of their slow breath,
and one day you will miss their awakening.
Watch the wind.
Watch the glaciers ease into a water dance—
that is the mountain dreaming.
Watch you do not race and retrace
the highway’s scars
without wondering
for whom the hills wait.
I-70 Corridor, Westbound