You have not been gentle, Elias,
though I’ve swum your postcard-perfect glacier waters
until, limbs frozen into pebbles, I fell to join the riverbed.
I’ve tried to love you;
here where we hold long grasses between our thumbs imitating
wolves and press summer between the sheets of blizzards and land
burned into
graveyards.
But you are not salmon hymning words into the sunset;
with hair like wild horses you
run rapids
swinging your way to river carved valleys where men
chew tobacco and spit out streams that run into lakes and great
oceans.
While I’ve tried to see the beauty of civilization sheltered in the
curve
of your mountains,
you are unlike any lover that I have cradled in the valley between
shoulder
and neck.
And you are right,
I don’t belong here.
Already I hear the call of steel-car panic and sky-scraping fury. I am
post-coital and cigarette-smoking cement street-ways that know
nothing
of dirt roads that
lead to nowhere. Yet, like me you are
untouched, unbidden, and unloved.
I will continue to listen to the scent of pine
and see the flavour of smoke hours after the fire has been drowned in
sand
and I can taste sleep on my fingers.
You were a little world made cunningly
and I hadn’t the intuition to decipher the hieroglyphs left by raven’s
feet at
the corners of your mouth.