From a Journal
[Note: this poem and the one that follows are based on a journal
I kept while serving as writer-in-residence at Denali National Park]
 
Woke to heavy rain, low clouds,
the wet-rag sky wrung out
with little hope for change. But hey--
 
it’s the park. Let’s go.
And driving toward Eielson, the rain
does change—to snow.
 
There on a hillside, a mother
grizzly playing with her cub--
delighted with each other
 
and by the frosty white,
they roll and wrestle in it.
At Eielson, a snowball fight
 
pits kids against the giddy bus
dispatcher. We take a hike.
And later hike again near
 
Stony Creek, noting a mound
of grizzly scat beside
a stretch of torn up ground
 
where the ravenous bear
rummaged turf for
ground squirrels—earth
 
gouged, mined, ripped, rocks
tossed aside like
ping-pong balls, a thorough
 
thrashing of the region.
Wild nature on a tear
alters our perspective (after
 
the playful grappling of
mother and cub) on the crushing
strength and menace of a bear.
 



Vision


Followed a fox toward Polychrome Pass.
Red smudged
with black along its lean rib-cage,
 
it rubs its muzzle on a former meal,
ignores the
impatient poet on its tail.
 
Then nearing the overlook, sun shearing
through low clouds
transmutes the view to glitter. Everything’s
 
golden, scintillant. I feel like a seedpod wafted
into space and
check my shaky hands on the steering wheel.
 
As the road crests over its top, boundaries
dissolve. Beside that
sheer intractable edge, I greet my radiant center,
 
discharge all my terms. How easy it seems
to channel between
worlds, my old self dying into a new,
 
with nothing firm to hold me here
but love. And that’s
what nature has it in its power to do.