Camping one night in the national forest
I got up to pee again
against a bristlecone pine.
You come around often, the pine said.
I’m an old man, I shrugged.
Same here, said the tree.
Tag: Rocky Mountains
Deer Trail
There have been times
as the season froze or thawed
when watching, you could see their tracks,
deep after warmer days.
Whether they took our path to the woodshop
or took the trail down to the ravine
by the old chicken coop /
or other times,
because the snow suggested it,
carved out their own path
straight down to the road.
We never see them.
The peach tree and the shade
doesn’t hold them now,
the cold too great.
But in the morning there are new tracks,
bold things that happened in the night,
invisible like us —
along the trail
or off the trail, like us.
She Comes Around
In the photograph from the wildlife camera
she appears at dusk, side-on,
her full tail in the air:
the big ginger cat
from the farm next door.
She is one of those puzzles you find
in newsprint books at the tobacconists
— which one of these doesn’t belong? —
because before and after her on the camera
are a mountain lion and a red fox.
I thought of the two bobcats who came
to the picture window on St. Stephen’s Day
at three o’clock in the morning
looking intently in,
and the man in Finland whose dog got out:
the wolves at the forest fringe
were calling it to come and play.
There was no blood, he said.
The dog just disappeared into their jaws.
Still, she comes around:
again this morning on the deer trail
where she sat gazing up,
the jays and the blackbirds with new hatchlings
diving, exploding into the air,
and her
wearing their worry and disapproval
— even, you think,
their appetites and their hatred,
like a bright blessing,
the urgent chatter of the birds
an electric hum
almost to the horizon.
Firestarter
Mr. Springer, who resides
at the dingy bungalow
on Constance Court
that we can see from the wooden deck
of our wooden house,
and who last Saturday started the fire
that burned a thousand acres of grass
due south along the lake —
that Mr. Springer,
who the neighbors,
shortly after, bilious,
suggested should go to prison
for the rest of his too-long life,
was just connecting
an electric fence.
Sparks flew.
They do
at high school dances and in fields
and sometimes catch fire
and run for all our panic water.
But now, across the road,
through the window of his living room,
I watch him watching television,
his generator in the driveway,
and around the place, the black grass
spread the way it did / not away
the way it did,
but sharp-tongued prairie now
licking up,
darkly, acidly
against the flickering wall
of his flickering house.
Madly, Deeply
There is only one life lesson,
and that is to grow things
with your own hands,
holding late April in her thin stalks,
wanting madly, deeply to grow,
needing madly, deeply to die,
to wither yellow.
The rest of it — the details,
the numbers and the lengths,
are like the magazines you read
in doctors’ waiting rooms,
idly taking what you find because it’s there,
idly leafing through but not subscribed,
the way we are subscribed
to the watery light of five o-clock,
the soft snow that fell overnight,
the deckle-edge daffodils already
bowing and browning,
subscribed to the stream that courses
through the deep ravine, raging and falling,
seeping, drying, gone
while we are summer sleeping,
subscribed to the heart-faced hyssop
and the houndstongue,
mouldering earth and bonemeal,
prom dances, promises, and handfasting,
in the humus, hen manure
and the worm castings,
cupping late April in her thin stalks,
saying our goodbyes
to the nursery newborns,
holding our new daughters
close to our chests like specters, weeping.
Ponderosa
We were reading stories
and the neighbors’ kids came round.
They sat, solemn, in the living room,
while Jean recited her cat book
and I served pink lemonade.
There were brownies.
Two boys leaped up, finally,
when the sitting was over
and ran along the driveway
to the ponderosa on the south.
I would have done the same once,
far too shy for small talk and small rooms:
a better fit
for a harbor of branches,
of pine straw and damp earth.
They were already hanging,
suspended like sloths,
when their mom called out:
“Guys! Be careful there!”
We don’t have kids.
No boys had ever swung
in the giant tree before,
and for me it lived
respectfully apart, an elder,
with a twin on the north side,
keeping the house between them
as a kind of indulgence.
When we turned to look
I noticed one limb
had torn from the trunk,
some way up —
a narrow elliptical scar
the color of country cream,
the scales of the arm less bright,
no longer that rich orange-gray
ponderosas get.
An old injury. Who knows how long?
Apparently you can take an injury
like that through the seasons,
through one summer after another
until it is almost hidden
by new, reluctant growth,
by weather,
by the furrows
and the plates of age.
Hawk Hovering
Above a stretch of buffalo grass
a Rough-legged Hawk sits in the wind.
The snow has blown in west-north-west
but it seems to come straight out of Wyoming,
hard enough that he beats his wings
only now and then,
otherwise suspended,
over a colony of prairie dogs,
over deer mice,
over small skittering birds.
He is used to the weather.
They breed far north, in the arctic,
and this spring in Colorado
with the warmth coming on
and the dormant grass greening,
the dry blowing snow of the high plains
is a perfect comma:
the ground is awake,
the sudden squall has caught prey
in between,
neither low nor about,
neither resting nor vigilant,
and he can wait here,
all day, untired,
head to the wind.
I May Have Left the Lights On
I may have left the lights on
in the workshop a few years back:
eight racks of glaring bare-bulbed fluorescent lights,
and as a result,
a flock of migrating geese,
navigating the rural dark of northern Colorado,
got confused,
fell out of the sky,
and hit the windshield of a Walmart truck
making a last-minute delivery of Christmas toys,
forcing the driver to swerve
into a ditch right off the frontage road
of the interstate.
He wasn’t badly hurt,
but most of the freight was a write-off
and the store never got the hip-hop penguin
that did the street dance waddle,
so when Karl Macklemore showed up,
who’d left it too late to get the one toy
his daughter wanted
(go to Walmart, his wife said,
everything else’ll be closed),
he found only empty shelves where
Pop & Lock Penguin should have been.
There was an argument when he got home.
Hard things were said,
things you couldn’t take back.
That’s it! I’m outta here, Karl said,
and he really left this time,
left the wife and his little girl Judy.
There were tears,
the worst Christmas morning ever.
But that was just the start:
on one salary, mom working shifts,
Judy missed more than a few days of classes
doing chores.
The school sent letters —
she was getting behind,
so Uncle Craig the engineer,
who lived just over in Galt and was retired,
said, I’ll teach the girl.
They met at Starbucks most afternoons
and did pretty well,
but Judy hated History,
she sneered at Social Studies,
fidgeted through French,
until Craig said okay,
I’m not much good at this stuff anyway.
Why don’t you come on out to the shed back home.
I’ll teach you how to solder.
You’re good at math and algebra.
We’ll kick around some schematic diagrams
and maybe we can work up something
for the county science fair.
She thought about the project for three weeks,
until seeing geese one night passing
in front of the moon —
a dark V and then nothing,
a dark V and then nothing,
she proposed this:
why don’t we wire the solenoid
so that when deer mice all over the world
breathe out
the change in air pressure
registers on this sensor here,
releasing the core,
and when barn owls move their eyes in sleep,
when prairie dogs jump and stretch,
all that vibration shakes the earth enough
that it trips the switch
and cycles the lights
on and off automatically.
And Uncle Craig thought for a moment
and said, that’s impossible.
Unless you calibrate the coil to account
for the minute shift in the geomagnetic field
when black bears dig at roots,
and then you know,
it just might work.
The day my nephew got back from the science fair,
a little depressed,
we asked him how it went.
He said, Okay I guess.
I didn’t win a prize.
It was that Judy with the green eyes,
inventor of the sudoSwitch.
We said, Who’s she?
He said:
She’s bat’s darling,
cousin of the winter wheat,
Spear of Science, Javelin Judy
with the jade-green eyes,
She-Who-Harvests-Stars,
called Watcher-of-Geese,
the moon’s electrician,
house god of the deer mouse,
the one who dances on the back
of ignorance
making the sign of the sigh.
Judy, whose name rhymes
with the taste of golden currants,
the last word on the lips
of den-bound foxes
when they say fox prayers,
whose name is the only password
in the wind-stroked shortgrass prairie;
hop-hipped hare hunter,
greyhound bitch,
inventor of the sudoSwitch.
No, I said, I would have remembered her.
So this sudoSwitch, what’s it do?
I dunno exactly, he mumbled.
They say it replaces want and fear.
It saves twenty-four megawatts of shame
each year,
makes colorful truths from white lies,
smooths crow’s feet,
corrects the camber of the wheel of the law,
autotunes the music of the spheres,
raises testosterone,
lowers the bridge of understanding between generations,
generates income, deflects
incoming insults, erects
lasting love
(but consult with a doctor
for an erection lasting more than four millennia),
deflowers virgin olive oil,
magnifies fine print, prints currency,
interrupts alternating current,
gives the sightless sight,
makes the indirect direct,
talks in pigeon-elf to elves,
and turns lights off by themselves
when you leave them on at night.
I laughed.
Good luck with that.
That’s not a problem for me, I said.
Valedictory
They say the Fern Lake fire is still burning
up around Estes Park.
It started in October in dry brush, open flame,
and then the snows of the eastern Rockies came,
but it still burns on below, Inuk fire,
too remote for hotshot crews,
and anyway it is April now —
who fights fires in early spring?
The last front dropped fourteen inches in the garden
around the new birdbath,
but memory being what it is,
full of non sequiturs
and awkward prompts that pull thoughts
where they wouldn’t choose to go,
I can’t see the birdbath, its blue supplicant bowl
piled up like a wedding cake with snow
and not see Berkeley evenings.
There was a lime tree in the back
wasn’t there?
on Dwight Way or Parker Street,
tart-green on the tongue, bittersweet —
and spaghetti dinners, a honey-skinned guitar.
But here in the foothills,
far below Fern Lake,
almost three decades gone,
I’ll wrap the snow in my arms
where it has piled up on the birdbath,
where the snow has bent
the branches of the sour cherry,
bring it melting to the kitchen,
say
so it came,
and so we came and went.
Deer Aspect
We slept in the thicket as we do,
half sleeping,
our thoughts walking on spring ice
branch to branch, as they do,
hearing up from the damp night of the earth
the etching into leaf of the smallest spider:
the orb weaver
the grass spider spinning, spinning
in the filtered light.
And feeling under the coarse hair of our bodies,
under the needles of our skin,
the seismic shifting of the rock,
the dry rock, the rock on fire,
far, far down —
our kin.
We wake fat some mornings, butter fat,
with our lips in leaf,
but some days inexplicably
I wake with muscled skin and hollow hair,
leaving the depression in the sumac
where our bodies have carved
hollows in the thicket, remembering
(the way we remember all fading dreams)
that I dreamed I was pale and almost hairless
with two straight and awkward legs,
coming and going through the copse
without asking and without permission,
closing the door of the great unnecessary house
in the morning, leaving,
and pocketing the keys.
Too bleak and beautiful 