OK, now I'm going to share a few poems with you.
I live at 4,000 feet in the Bitterroot
Mountains of Montana.
And the place where I live, you can walk out
the door-- it backs up against the Selway-Bitterroot
Wilderness area, and you can walk to Idaho without seeing
another human being.
Unfortunately, we were just discovered by developers,
and we're in a lawsuit.
But we're hoping that it stays that way
because what we were hoping, is that we could leave
that land in public trust.
But right now, we were told that we cannot even put
a conservation easement on it because we're in what's called
the developer's nightmare sandwich.
But this was written about this time of year in that place.
Foxfire, Foxfire being that blue light given off
by decaying vegetation and hopefully not
a strained metaphor for the mind feeding on what comes before.
"Foxfire."
Once, I thought we would know everything.
That's what this was for, this foxfire, this fragrant energy,
like nighthawks screaming at dusk.
All winter, I stalked elk that were down
from the mountain and starving.
I walked the low places where they galloped through slush,
the rocks where they wallowed and pawed for new grasses,
the tooth marks on aspen, the mineral lick, the creek where
the water was roiled, milky.
I sweated through immovable snow, fell down exhausted,
but when I imagined I'd stand in a thicket, my eyes glazed
over my sharp breath and know the hot communion of elk,
I was wrong.
Once I thought we were all gods, blessed,
strutting this lovely planet.
The Earth was a minor passing, like the path down
to our ditch for water, pretty with serviceberry,
but transient.
As a young girl, I swung upside down with other girls
as we hung by our heels from a jungle
gym and contemplated heaven.
It was a silky place.
I preferred purgatory, retrievers
curled about the table legs and the warm abraded doors.
At 38, I'm still the babe of my family.
Once I thought they would teach me,
that even their last breath would be a key,
but now I see them drifting off from their easy chairs,
like a tribe leaving shore together, the television
blaring, their mouths sagged open,
and when they return for brief moments,
they stare at me as if I were a stranger.
All that I will ever know is right here
in the wash and till of these few acres.
Frost tonight and behind it, the whole summer so brief
I can still see the bronco-face calf
born to the bloody pasture and the brown trout suspended
in its first glittering insect hatch.
There will never be more than twilight,
a valley receding to glass.
In this tiny paradise of common flowers,
the waist-high marigolds blaze up like golden dowagers.
Venus rises alone, early to a cold black sky.