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Posts Tagged ‘Colorado’

Getting In the Car to Drive to Cortez

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on September 14, 2025| 4 Comments »


 
I bring with me the face of the mother I saw on the news,
the one whose shoulders shuddered as a friend
led her from the scene. I bring the ugliness
of the words I read on Facebook, black letters
on a red screen preaching rage and retaliation.
I bring the hollow cheeked boy wearing blue
greasy clothes and the smudged white body bag,
and together we drive through the canyon
where the river is swollen from last night’s rain
and the tops of cottonwoods are just beginning
to turn golden. We don’t say anything as we rise
into the valley to see mountain peaks sleeved in white.
A small bear stands on the side of the road
on his back legs, dragging acorns into his mouth
with both upper paws. A slate blue cloud
smudges the distant sky and every branch, every
rock, every bumper, every porch sparkles
in morning sun. How do we metabolize it all?
Oh body, great receptor, portal for wonder and pain.
Who am I when I step out of the car? Changed.

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Where We’re From

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on July 16, 2024| 8 Comments »


 
 
Though I love this high desert,
I am a lake walking amidst
the cactus and the pinyon pine.
I am sunsets on flat water
and waves in the spring.
I bring my white trillium soul
to the arroyo and let dry sand
run through my fingers.
They never leave me,
these Wisconsin summers,
even though I left them when
I was a barefoot girl,
even though I’ve made a home
amongst red rock cliffs and empty
river beds where the gray trunks
of juniper twist in deep curves
and red-tailed hawks spiral
making visible the wind.
How surprising it is to discover now
in my silvering years some new
insight into what it means to belong:
how sometimes we choose,
how sometimes we are chosen.

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On the South Platte River Trail in Northeastern Colorado

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on May 4, 2021| 2 Comments »


 
Some people say there’s nothing out there,
nothing but plains and the Platte and the sky.
A whole horizon of nothing,
and a barbed wire fence to hold back
all that nothing. But when you drive
through that nothing
perhaps a young scrappy man
on a half-breed mustang
will ride through your thoughts,
and hand you a letter
from one hundred sixty years ago.
For you, he’ll say with a tip of his hat
before he gallops away toward the west.
What might the past have to say to you
sent via Pony Express?
Perhaps something about
the beauty of nothing,
or how the road you choose matters.
Go ahead, friend, what are you waiting for?
Open that letter.

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