hitchhiking year round at 9,000 feet for forty winters

I tell my therapist about planting marigold seeds in my backyard

the many gnarled eyes on the green green bark catch the not quite snow

I look out at the lake see within it so many strands of tangled living

I am asked what it is like to have grown up in Colorado for apparently it is rare

I think about my legacy as I drive through the thin rain  up the canyon, home 

I’ve been working on naming the winds for sometimes it seems

aboriginal author Tyson Yunkaporta talks about pigs released into the wild

driving up the canyon I look out upon walls of pine and see hints of brown

I keep forgetting the month because its February but it feels like May

I must have driven this canyon a few thousand times in my life I’ve driven it too fast when I was a teen

driving home under the sunset I watch a few hundred geese fly over the highway

you once told me on the weekends you’d rent a horse and ride along the river

it is said in Hawaiian indigenous traditions that to know the winds of a place is to know the place itself

there was a gas leak on my street and so the power company came and cut up the road

I wake thirsty and empty the glass I keep on my nightstand then go to the bathroom

gotta take the truck in again the light just came on and it’s shuttering when I start it up

the pine beetle dies only when the temperature drops below zero for two weeks but it hasn’t gotten this cold

and so I didn’t win the poet laureate position for the town of Nederland but my poems

driving to the hardware store I see the southernmost city limit sign torn off its poles