New Morning, Cedar Mesa

by Andrew Schelling

Night came fast,
you can’t believe how cold the curtained dark.
We reach camp 5:00 pm the snakeweed
already brittle —
the elements, heigh ho the elements,
the metaphysics bare when you have ten minutes
or less to get the twisted
juniper branches lit.

Night has its needs —
sleeping bag, foam pad, the Durango
cowboy blanket with cochineal band.
Yeats says the four–beat ballad
got thrust aside by pentameter
a curtain of dark,
igneous rock forced the laccolith & poetry — ?
poetry went somewhere else

lost its heigh ho
under a slag of too much thought.

Fire, stone, sun, ice, wind,
the elements.
Tell me your dream my blue–eyed love
does it double my own
torn sleep?

Through camp a coyote
heigh ho’d past the Marmot tent

paw–track
red clay imprint in the wash.
Do you my love
study the cottonwood or stars,
and wake to the raw elements?

Here greet sun at daybreak. Kindle fire for bacon.
Coffee as the block ice melts.
Your gentle limbs sustain me, out there —
the wind and the rain
a thousand
jagged mountains west.

12:xi:2022