out of the blue…

…folder, a handful of poems fell out. Poems I’d forgotten I’d written so many years ago I can hardly count. This one was from 1990. We were living in Utah for a winter because John was a writer-in-residence at a university there. Almost every weekend we went off exploring. We had a Toyota van and we drove to New Mexico, Arizona (to see the Betatakin cliff dwellings), Colorado (to drive up Mesa Verde), and to Dinosaur National Monument (because we had small boys obsessed with dinosaurs). We’d travel and explore, looking at pictographs of lizards and wedge-shaped people, and sometimes we drove back to our rented apartment in Provo late in the evening. I was the way I am now, the way I’ve always been, dreaming myself into landscapes, places, imagining the life I might live there–ranches near Moab, small weathered houses on the edge of dry washes, even a box canyon with an old homestead soft with lilacs and silvered fences, a tire swing on an ancient cottonwood. This poem distills those yearnings, doesn’t it? I wrote a couple of essays about that winter, published in my book Phantom Limb, but I’d forgotten about this poem, folded up with a couple of others, paper yellowing, waiting to be opened up, read, remembered.