You know Blue Mountain. You’ve climbed it before.
How many times? That drive across the ancient lake,
once glacial, now peopled with ranch homes,
dotted white with good neighbors, privet hedges.
How many times parked beside pickups, unleashed the Airedales.
Done your best to forget. There on the west end of town,
under a panoramic sky where grasses, hay high,
mound toward the pine line. Wheat and blue bunch, sage
and fescue. Thick spike rooted in the rocky loam.
Dead branches of blow down broken how many times before,
tossed for the fetchers over currants, red now with August’s portent.
You want this swaying sea of stems, candle-gold,
to carry you to a raft on the river, in cutoffs with a bamboo pole.
Instead you slog up slow, up to the mottled bark, vanilla trunks—
ponderosas, sap-beaded, redolent with glassy oblivion.
You want the hurt to stop, you want the summer your lover,
rays of sun spotlighting through boughs. “Stay,”
you want to say to the stranger who pets your dogs.
“Kick the cones across the draw. Get lost. With me.”
In the gully, up the deer trail. To the lookout.
Up to where you lose sight of yourself seeing Sentinel, Snowbowl,
ridges down the Bitterroot—all the distant mountains
that surround your sorrow, turning solitude to solace.
Russet needles underfoot, moss dayglow yellow on a branch.
So bright, so stunning, so willing you to stop your thought.