Sand Creek
A week alone in the mountains, the aspen leaves have turned.
I come up to Music Pass from Sand Creek.
To the east lie the expanse of the Wet Mountain Valley
and the slopes of Douglas fir and ponderosa
climbing the flanks of Greenhorn Peak.
South, the Sangre de Cristos sweep in a great curve
to Blanca Peak, Little Bear and Linsey.
The Wet Mountains drop away to the Great Plains,
a thousand miles of grass and rolling hills.
So much space and quiet that you might ignore for a while
the steady drumbeats of war, the pitchmen who try
to sell us happiness and love, or how wealth
is tortured from the giving earth.
All my adult life, mountains and poetry --
Li Po, Tu Fu, Han Shan,
the mist covered ranges of the Appalachians, poems on rocks and bark.
Snyder and Whalen, Rexroth and Jeffers,
the shining peaks of the Cascades and Sierras,
dreams of revolution and of summers spent at fire look-outs
The Rocky Mountains, jagged and purple above sage
covered plains, range upon range of rock and ice.
I think of friends gone,
lost to avalanche or storm in the Andes or Himalayas,
who wandered off and never returned.
What is of value?
I have given my life to mountains, music, and words.
Hard soil, a woman’s smile.
Years spent shooting arrows at the moon.
Last night, a camp at treeline on the moraine below Pico Isalado.
When I first came to these mountains 25 years ago
the snows lingered in the high cirques year around.
Now they’re gone by late August.
Of all the losses that I’ve seen –
vast forests, countless species, whole cultures, languages and ways of life –
the loss of the world’s glaciers moves me the most,
an elegy for a world, written through absence.
.
The sun goes down as I leave the pass and drop into the forest of limber pine.
It seems a long way back to the cities, but nothing is remote anymore.
Earlier today, a fighter jet came low and fast up the valley, over the pass,
then, as quickly as it appeared, gone, the mountains swallowing its roar
in a ringing silence.
Now, a chill wind blows in from the east
and darkness rises from the valley floor.