Fire stormed this canyon,
Wobbled time and inscribed itself
In char, this otherworld,
Where cedars brushed our faces today,
Decades later, the air so fragrant
We stopped and looked up
Surprised by young aspens and willows
Gold on talus slopes, the stone arch
High on the ridgeline
Encircling finitude’s neutral blue.
The valley, Lao Tzu said, is boundless,
Inexhaustible—a shadowland
We climbed from all morning
Toward sunlight on the pass, a chill
Enfolding us like lichen-stippled granite,
A silence we broke only
To speak of stalemate in the Capitol,
The daily bitch slap of insult and grievance
Or what it means to claim
We want to live another twenty years.
By dusk, needle ice
Crunched underfoot and a pair of eyes
Surfaced from the pond’s reflected sky,
Peering at whatever myopic blur
We’ve become, hurrying toward shelter.
The canyon wren, too,
Watched from its haven
In a ninebark burnt red by frost,
Weighing what songs and how much tenderness
We still hunger for.
David Axelrod teaches letterpress printing at the University of Montana on a 1935 Hacker Test Press. He’s a founder of Bear Scratch Press and author of 10 poetry collections, most recently, Skiing with Dostoyevsky: New & Selected Poems. He lives in a former gravel pit where he tends a small native plants nursery.
This poem was selected by March curator Piotr Florczyk. He writes: “David Axelord is a master at combining the micro and the macro, and reading his work I am in awe of the world’s variegated, fragile beauty. Because human hubris knows no bounds, alas, we need poems like his, poems reminding us that we are merely passing through.”