Aftermath

I have tried to say this other ways—

we were damaged. Cold mountain mornings,

broken branches trembled in our drowsy air.

Sagebrush washed through the fence lines.

The canal curved flat, power lines dissected

chicory-ripe ridges. Our plum tree swayed

heavy in the wind. Outside the house,

swollen bulbs in the ground stunned suddenly

open, corrosive with lethargy. My eyes,

sun-withered wicks, squinted behind half-drawn curtains.

Hard to stay out of the dark, isn’t it? What does

it matter what held me, or who,

but the ghost of the lost and gone? Each day,

my life begins. Crab apples spatter the ravine.

Towhees scream and I’ve become so used

to that sound, another sharp heart in the yard’s stark tune.

This time it isn’t the rest of the raptured earth

I hear but myself, yearning this way.

Always seems what I wanted to be true about heartache

isn’t. There is no bullet-worthy clemency. It knows

no ease. I can sense it—absence, its tunneling

of the body; a grief I learned to live through by not

remembering whole days. It gets easier, is what

I mean. What a lie it’d be to say every school

shooting no longer shakes me from dreams, awake

and heaving, splashed in my own vomit. Takes

all but dying to slip from my skin, to calm

the beating between the ribs. The only world I knew;

mountains, the blur of light and shadow from Evans,

Quandary—ice-gutted glaciers letting go,

is not the same country I see leaning over

these fences, split-pitch pine awash in June grass,

lodgepoles pulled to the ground

like half-sunk tusks, but it’s the closest I can get to a home

anymore. I’m still living behind a meadow, studying

the shape of snowcaps. Cone-heavy fir trees rock

on the face of the creek, needles split like hairpins

in the ditch weed. Over and beyond, the mountains

never move; they stay where they are

and never move. Only weak haze drifts across

them now, faint and thin, violet streaks reach

across frozen skies. Shouts fill the dugouts.

Cleats in the fields clutch and run through mud and past

the chain-link, the ranges spread on forever. Magenta

wounds. The rage in us blistering.

Flag half-mast at the high school. Just cottonwoods forever,

then evergreens. Above tree line, bristlecones torque

into themselves, petrified. Starts of wet flakes

wield outward. End the drifting for miles down

these hills. Send me down, spin me in all directions.

This is one way of accepting the life I’ve inherited—

let the dead dream along the churning edges of earth.

All the surprises ahead of me I already know.