Posted by While volunteers and researchers record the science of the many species found at this year’s BioBlitz, writers across Colorado are putting down a record of their own as well.
This series of posts presents a brief selection from the full “Poetic Inventory of Rocky Mountain National Park” to be published by Colorado’s own Wolverine Farm Publishing.
Rocks, trees, and water create the backdrop and home for the many species of the park. Photo courtesy Your Shot.
Western Terrestrial Garter Snake (Thamnophis elegans)
& Western Wood-Pewee (Contopus sordidulus)
“Clade, Landscape with Thamnophis elegans vagrans, Contopus sordidulus, and Homo sapiens sapiens” by Jake Adam York
The rock is moving,
schist, granite, shale
raised up, folded, etched,
moved by ice
and wind, by water, and
by rain, brought down,
washed back to the craton,
to rivers, to the sea.
And here, the rock is moving
like a braided stream,
light bands in dark, diffracted
sun, the rippling
grains, and here
the rock is moving,
felsic bands
twisting free
from the mafic, elegant,
vertebrate, almost
schistic,
another kind of iron
that quickens you,
that eases one leg back
before you read the marks right,
garter, not rattler,
moving slow from bush
to brush in the slow morning air
that stills you, too,
the chill darting into the sun
for you, your movement
like the day’s first flycatcher,
the pewee rising
from its dusk into light
and falling back again
to wait for its hunger’s next slake.
Here, we are
the isopleths of night’s
feathering into day, of day’s
into night, into skin and skull and blood,
one of us
without feet, vagrant if terrestrial,
and one with feet so small
it cannot walk upon the ground,
and one, always
walking up and down, always
between these worlds.
How long, my subtle brother,
how long, little tyrant,
since we curled the same
spine, since this hunger
was one, this day,
this blood that moves in us,
that moves us like rock,
raising us up,
and pulling us apart again?
Used with permission from A Poetic Inventory of Rocky Mountain National Park / Wolverine Farm Publishing.
More in This Series
