There's A Lot Of New Life Out There

 

Horses make a landscape look beautiful.

~ Alice Walker

 

Wings

Hawks were all over the place! Green Mountain road was free of snow and the sage and buttercups were reaching up, trying to grab the sun before the clouds took over that blue sky. At every bend in the gravel road, behind every cliff, a Red Tail's wingspan would appear and dip and then the bird would soar away. This happened so many times, for miles. Once, we stopped the car and got out to watch. C took pictures of one doing circles 'round and 'round, looking down on us, like he'd never seen humans before. Maybe he was protecting some nest tucked away on the other side of the cliffs. Maybe he was simply saying, look at me, I can fly!

Hawk lady, Helen Macdonald, has written a memoir. So far, so wonderful.

Could this be a little Warbler of some kind? He certainly was trilling like there was no tomorrow.

Here's Mama Owl! Her tail feathers, anyway. She made her nest deep this year. She's learning. Wise owl.

Here you can see her face. Somewhere in that nest is at least one fuzzy white owlet. We saw it, for only a moment.

I will go back there again today in hopes of seeing the baby balancing on a branch in the sunshine.

The sage is growing long and lush near the creek.

Cloud rumble. Or something like that.

Wherever we go, there they are. The Pronghorn Antelope is the quintessential prairie animal and my favorite of all the creatures that fly.

Peppergrass. The entire plant is edible.

The beginning of the end of the day.

 

 

 

 

She's A Place

 

My Sister

My sister is a place where

Sorrel horses walk single file through tall

Lodgepole stands,

Where sunlight severs down and dulls and shatters

Before it hits the ground,

Where the grass is tall saw grass, wavy

Like the grass in the Sargasso Sea,

Where eels spawn and the new eels

Migrate to the continents of their parents'

Origin, inexplicably...

We don't know how they do that.

Life is nothing if not obvious.

My sister is a place where

I left the gas cap on top of the '82 Land Cruiser.

It's got to be around here somewhere,

But I can't find it,

And if it's around here

It's walled by snowy mountains where

The wildflowers (lupines, columbines, penstemon)

Bloom a month later than here,

And are smaller,

And all around are aspen trees turning yellow

As their yellow leaves turn in the wind,

Where things that fall and roll away

Cannot be found under the fragrant sage,

And as I look around, I'm thinking

Of the time I chained and churned and shoveled

That rig through five miles of thigh-deep snow,

Occasionally jacking it up in back

And tipping it off forward to keep going

Just to get to a phone to call a girl,

And the time I drove with my daughter

Across Nebraska and Iowa in 105 degrees,

Blocks of ice to cool us pooling on the floor.

My sister is a place where

Rivers swell in spring and falter in the fall.

My sister is a place

Where no time passes.

We cannot live there.

-James Galvin