All the clouds come torn to this valley.
They are ragged, refugees
weeping from their flight over mountains.
They follow the brown, rough-furred flanks of the elk.
Watch their camel jaws chew in time with the green rain.
The thunder reminds their bodies of the spring before,
and before that, lucid seasons,
the long hikes of their lives,
the meadows they have loved in,
how their mates and children were suddenly cold
or blood-swept or frozen in the snow.
They lower their heads to the earth
and breathe mist on the worms.
Rain grazes my face
as I haul my cramped heart to the river.
The air sleeps gray over the water.
Everything is its own colour.
New green eyes peer out of the poplar's skin.
The pines have brushed their pointed teeth.
What clean breath these mountains have.
I walk the paths of the forest.
My hands grow cold as I lean over
the deep pools in the river.
The fish there are sentimental,
drifting, their eyes glinting
in the wet-emerald kingdom.
Yesterday
tons of rock roared down the scree slopes,
broke out of the mountain's cankered side.
Such noise, a hoopla rumbling down, such an event!
The pika's blood plunged through her suede body.
The gray jays dashed among the trees.
Even the ravens swooped black over the river,
their wings panting fear fear as they flew.
Now huge boulders and stones.
Now rocks embroidered orange with lichen
flood the path.
I clamber over, clumsy goat,
my overcoat sleepy and drenched,
dragging behind me like a tail.
I touch the fallen rocks.
They look like other things,
long-eared warthogs,
tiny bison,
gray dogs barking without teeth.
Some of them are clearly the broken flesh
of the mountain resting on the earth.
For the first time in centuries, rain kisses
their inner skins.
Yesterday the mountain roared,
part of its body crashing down
over trees, ants, drowsing butterflies,
the litter of mice beneath a spruce root.
But that great percussion is hushed now.
I hear the drummer-ghost of rain.
The sky's hand clenches wet cloth.
My boots stumble, awkward on the rocks.
I look at my palms, pink, too soft.
They ask, Is there no other place for us?
The up-ended roots of dead trees
are the time-slaughtered hands
of my grandmother.
Gone now,
all that noise.
Many of the rocks resemble the masks of old men.
There, higher up the slope
is my father's face,
his gutted eyes,
his nose, broken deep at the bridge.
Oh, the rain.
Oh
is the word the earth whispers
when we make a hole for our dead.
My face grows wet as I wander
this domain of dark wing, hard hoof.
Yesterday, the mountain heaved for the sky
and ripped open her shoulder.
In the keen wounds of rock, I find
entrails of memory, my own blood,
the petrified bones
of those I failed to love.