Sometimes everything is Montana or at least for today. It's
nearly 9 pm and the light sits high as 4 pm back east. Another
reason why Montana holds on like the ocean the bear grass
the sage sand dune. Everything becomes Montana
even The Cantos of Ezra Pound, which I'm reading
this summer. Let me make a collage of lines:
(These fragments you have shelved [shored].)
The leaves are full of voices
Crescent of blue-shot waters, green-gold in the shallows
The water whirls up the bright pale sand in the spring's mouth
The shallow eddying fluid
Blue agate casing the sky
The sputter of resin
This wind is the wind of the palace
Great bulk, huge mass, thesaurus
The stone is alive in my hand
And will not hawk nor hunt
Nor get her free in the air
Nor watch fish rise to bait
Nor the glare-wing'd flies alight in the creek's edge
And the old voice lifts itself
Weaving an endless sentence
Everything even Pound is Montana but then
doesn't that happen when you travel to some
new landscape and your lens shifts and what
ever you look at or do or think about while
in that new place is marked. Remember reading
The Lovely Bones in Florence and how the
vineyard became an ossuary.
Here the elk shuttle across meadows like ghosts
because Montana means mountain and the mountains
do rise to meet the roof of the sky or the floor
of the earth depending on where you stand.
