Boom of the avalanche cannons
as warm winds layer the snow
with ice, loosening the pack
here on the steep mountainsides
where snowboarders flow
over the moguls
and down the slopes—
in their packs small GPS chips
signaling their location,
whether it’s the Sunshine slopes,
Rundell Coffee Shop,
or an engulfing tide of snow.
We are one resonating, relayed
web, reaching out to each other
around the globe,
bearing the voices of our dead
and the Voyageur exiting
our solar system
and the news of the newborn
arrivals, the tracks we briefly
make in the woods.
Thousands of years this place
I call wilderness
has been walked or ridden,
hunted and fished,
has housed and fed families
moving slowly by foot,
the net of memory’s stories
gather, growing, knotted,
held: where the hot springs are,
the deer, how to read
the layers of snow,
the scat of bear and cougar.
And how do we know?
Our readers of the soil
slumped from the Bow river
sort out flint chips,
charcoal pits, incised bones,
compute ratios of isotopes,
conjure the whole, what legend
has already told and known.
These tall lodgepoles
outside my window
spoke to me twenty winters ago,
sap and bark weeping
at forty below
with the work of growth
and letting go.