I just got back from a great journey from Boulder, CO down through Taos, over to Sante Fe, up though the four corners, Navajo land and the painted hand wilderness, Canyon of the Ancients, Lowery land, Pueblo III and Anasazi and B'lisi and Hovenweep Windlerness, Durango and all along the Animus, back road in to Ouray then Telluride, stopping by Little Molas Lake and really not remembering anything as breathtaking as that. And this summer all I can think of is the Galloping Goose train and how it must have felt to come barrelling down from the San Juan Forest with a wagon full of beer, butter, wheat and whiskey. But what more is there for a southern fellow to do when he is out by himself with a spinning mind at 12,000 feet, nowhere to be and a stack of county road maps.

--

Indian Peaks, 29 degrees

This June, this second month of summer,
I walked in to a high mountain town to hide
away for as long as needed, and let my body
turn back to snow. This is the white-lightness
of escape, and no one knows how it feels to be
damp, hung in a cedar, watching moose near
the edge of this glacial lake, mirror plane above
such deep cool well of more than thirst, enough
for a man to fall from the tree for, to fall from
where he was hung, drift down with a slow dive
of gravity, not fast enough for pain. Now the white
suit melts, now I am back down again and the phone
rings in song set by my daughter, and lunch is mine
to make, man alone at home, with a window to look
out from and that distant feeling of being in the wrong
place, nothing right yet, but with night coming, and that
is the best time to become light again, become snow.