Heart Butte, Montana

The unsympathetic wind, how she has evaded me for years now,

leaving a guileless shell and no way to navigate. Once when I stood

on a plateau of earth just at the moment before the dangerous,

jutting peaks converged upon the lilting sway of grasslands, I almost

found a way back. There, the sky, quite possibly all the elements,

caused the rock and soil and vegetation to congregate. Their prayer

was not new and so faint I could hardly discern. Simple remembrances,

like a tiny, syncopated chorus calling everyone home: across

a thousand eastward miles, and what little wind was left at my back.

But I could not move. And then the music was gone.

All that was left were the spring time faces of mountains, gazing down,

their last patches of snow, luminous. I dreamed of becoming snow melt,

gliding down the slope and in to the valley. With the promise,

an assurance, that there is always a way to become bird, tree, water again.