Landmark
I wonder whether the land marks itself in pride
like a woman draping a pearl alongside her cheek,
or if a man marks the land into his mind
like that woman’s name tattooed across his wrist.
North Park, CO
Grace
You ski like a man.
Like a really good one,
but you're not exactly graceful.
My brothers' comments pounded then
like my heavy skis through the snow mounds
not yet hardened into moguls.
Now I cup my hips around the bumps,
ease the edges into the troughs,
hold the idea of dancing in my mind
and tension in my stomach.
I don't throw myself down the mountain, anymore.
I skim instead of shovel against the drifts.
This year a sweet boy complimented my grace.
He doesn't know I learned the easy fluidity
artificially
from an insecurity. But grace
strived after, obtained through habit,
(and I mean of the tongue,
not just the damping of my knees and the strength in my back,
and I mean gentleness)
is perhaps all the more mine.
Arapahoe Basin, CO
Hope
(Or, Roughly, Happiness)
There will be more light glinting off the leaves.
There will be more leaves greeting the wind in broad eagerness,
once these yellow and crumple.
There will be more breezes taming their hours and miles
into the gentlest touch on a cheek.
Earth and sun will spin new time
like the old women at their wheels in Scotch tales
or the young Fates weaving Greek legends.
Young men will chip money from stone
or grow it from the ground
or trade it for the labor of their minds.
Old men will think new stories
which the mothers will form into character
and the children into dreams.
And those dreams will strengthen into abundance
like sap into wide-spreading branches
where wind and leaves and light
dance to the years
and to the children’s love.
Littleton, CO
Mine Tailings
The mines bleed into our rivers,
dying the streams glacial blue or fire orange.
Their tailings snout out from the evergreens in silent valleys
and spill down the walls of every distant alpine bowl.
For a child, though,
prospecting holes mined out the oldest thoughts of a mountain.
The years rusted tin cans, nails, and other old trash
into things of interest.
For a child, that rubble was the threshold
of adventure, and of home,
as it once was for rough men digging at a dream.
Locke said that nature imprinted by labor is property.
That's what these mines were, all those years ago.
But time,
time kept by the echo of rocks dislodged by our feet,
time rolled into a century or two,
sides with Emerson,
who says that nature mixed round with humanity
yields art.
Berthoud Pass, CO
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
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
South Platte Hotel
Where the North and South Forks
greet each other eagerly,
link arms, and skip
down the narrowing canyon toward Lake 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 wore 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,
dandies, 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
Stargazing
In the shy, small hours two nights ago,
I wandered between blurry sleep and a blacktop
overspread with blankets.
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
The Water Abundant
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 these 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
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
Elevation 50 ft
My professor said "nostalgia"
first described the illness of Swiss troops
away from home.
The doctors invented the word
from "Nostos," Greek for "homecoming."
I understood the longing lifting in their chests
for silent, star strewn nights
upon mountains fearful in their weightiness.
I knew, too, that a thing as delicate as a columbine
can break a thing as strong as normalcy.
Palo Alto, CA