Crossings

Between forest and field, a threshold 

like stepping from a cathedral into the street—

the quality of air alters, an eclipse lifts,  

boundlessness opens, earth itself retextured 

into weeds where woods once were.

Even planes of motion shift from vertical 

navigation to horizontal quiescence:   

there’s a standing invitation to lie back 

as sky’s unpredictable theater proceeds.  

Suspended in this ephemeral moment 

after leaving a forest, before entering

a field, the nature of reality is revealed. 

- Ravi Shankar 

Ravi Shankar was a visiting faculty member for the 2011 Jackson Hole Writer's Conference. 

A Mountain Lion Makes Ready

The butte in snow is a hand, palm up, to catch
stray bits of sagebrush, ghostly pines, to pass you
to the sky. In preparation, you forsake

the moon, traverse like hunger the high winter
pastures. Everything ascending leaves
its track—a red fox drops a chain of sprig-

sized cups, a snowmobile spits up a long
gnawed ribbon, and the lunging dogs carve
dragon backs—which snow discloses and will hide

in time. Winter is a slow magician, and you
leave little to illusion—willows dangle
your scent like so much ice; the ground nurses

blood of the one-eyed mule; even the shuddering pine
you climb at dawn unfurls gold filaments
over the yelping dogs each time you shift

a haunch. Below, a black creek cuts the world
you rule in two, and the arriving engine whines
like nothing you have heard or killed before.

- Cecily Parks 

Cecily Parks was a visiting faculty member for the 2011 Jackson Hole Writer's Conference. 

Bread Ode

The dough rises whether we punch it or not.
The yeast is meant for scent.

The salt came first.
The wheat is loving the oven.

The body craves its various breads
as it craves stars in summer
or snow in December.

The smells of bread are a beatitude.
The crusts of bread are undulant land.

Even the baker dreams of kneading
and needing, of smelling and

tasting and salting,
of rising under an awning of rain.

- by Laurie Kutchins 

Laurie Kutchins was a visiting faculty member for the 2011 Jackson Hole Writer's Conference. 

Childhood Elegy

If our angels hover above us,

they will see a darkening cornfield, the spectral traces

of lightning bugs, and two brothers

lying among the stalks. 

We come because sometimes it is hard to live.

The cornstalks, limp under the tropical sun,

revive in the cool of twilight.

The angels will know we have been here for hours.

They will land and rest their feathers around us

and whisper soothing names of winged things: finch, monarch,

whippoorwill, ptarmigan, Daedalus, Icarus, Gabriel...

The angels will bend down and touch their faces

onto ours and borrow our eyes: Earlier,

a horse slipped, breaking its leg. 

A boy stood beside his younger brother.

Their father came into the stable, carrying a gun.

Quails flitted out of a bamboo tree; the boy

traced the trail that had led him here,

the field tilled by the dead horse,

where his brother laid down,

dust on his cheeks.    

-  by Joseph O. Legaspi 

Joseph O. Legaspi was a visiting faculty member for the 2011 Jackson Hole Writer's Conference.