I used to live on the East Coast.
I'm a transplant to Montana and to Arizona.
I grew up in Southwestern Pennsylvania,
in an industrial suburb of Pittsburgh,
in a working-class family, where my relatives
worked in the factories, and mines,
and did farming, as well.
I always had a dream of leaving the eastern cities
and enjoying a quiet life in the West.
This actually happened about 10 years ago.
My husband and I moved to Big Fork, Montana,
which isn't far from the Canadian border.
And so, for almost 10 years, I've
lived the quiet life next to a lake in Northwest Montana,
working on my art and going deeply
into myself, which was hugely different from my former life,
the more social life that I lived
in the suburbs of Washington, DC.
The first poem from my new book, Hand of the Wind,
has it setting at the National Bison Range
in Moiese, which is about an hour and a half south of us
in Big Fork.
And it's a wonderful place where you can get in your car
and you can drive for three hours
and see elk, antelope, bear, bison.
I couldn't have written this poem as a suburban soccer mom
or even as someone who grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh.
It's called "Bison, Moiese Range."
Dirty gods in the dry dust, bison
roll their shaggy haunches.
Their great heads shake like the helmets of Valkyrie.
It's foreign soil they roll in, I think, rife with rocks,
home to elk and rattlesnake.
What is your secret, bison?
From your dark, enormous body, your expansive chest,
appetites take shape.
Your pink tongue protrudes.
Your mouth fills itself too full.
You roll and scratch, bellow.
Near three chattering magpies come down from the high pine.
You were the animal life I love, thick and hot,
dense with laziness and desire.