The Phantom Antler Mountains
There is a mountain range missing in Idaho,
According to the geologists Alt and Hyndman.
Parts of it show up in
Nevada, California, British Columbia.
Could it be in southeast Oregon
Buried under cubic miles of
Basalt and ash.
Maybe it rocks on
In the mountains north of Carey.
When continent collided with the ocean floor,
The elusive Antler Mountain orogenic evidence
Was gradually destroyed by the Rocky Mountains.
Hard to lose a range of mountains
Just like that,
300 million years before Lewis and Clark.
Tramping around Idaho's mountains,
The Sawtooths and the Selkirks,
The Lost River and White Knob mountains,
You just know there just has to be more to it
Than meets the eye.
Under the earth somewhere
Else beneath the sea,
Molten lava mountains
Cooking up or melting slowly down
Going begging to be climbed are
The Phantom Antler Mountains.
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Stinging Nettles
I want to get a feel for the earth.
Nothing fancy
Just that strange sensation of sinking
A little farther in with each succeeding step
Backward through my spent youth and childhood.
On that lane with the nettles nearly closing it,
Dark green from a droughthy summer
Growing up out from under the unplaned plank fence
Could grab and burn you in the unsettled dust
But you kept running like you had forever to run out of time in.
So beautiful and always
My mother there between us.
If she'd disappeared for even 30 seconds
It would have happened natural
In a mutual god-numbed rut.
There is no way to make this sound
Any more horrible than it was:
Innocent desire thwarted by too much supervision
Turns paradise to ashes even memory
Can not and will not redeem.
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Idaho Skies
Our next door neighbors to the north and east
Must bake freeze or bask
Under the big sky reputation of Montana.
Here the skies are stapled on the horizon
To the corners of your eyes
By the fixed and pitiless gaze of the raptor.
Eat me, the jackrabbit screams
In daily trial and error to be motionless
Beneath a cloudburst sky.
Cruel conservative ignorance is forcing
Its fascist predilection for a static solution
On mammals and leftover flying reptiles alike.
The lava flows have cooled and dried
The Missouri wagon wheel trails
Rutted out to Oregon.
Left behind, left over, left out,
The blue sky passes quickly over Idaho
Leaving the dark to roar
There is nothing here
Between you and
The flamboyant stars.
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The Snake River Plain
Underneath this paradise for raptors
A sore spothot spot opened
When the meteor broke through the mantle
And all lava bubbled forth.
From the Oregon end of this great scar of flatness
All the way to Yellowstone Park,
The continent continues drifting to the southwest.
The hot spot is stationary on the mantle.
Only the earth is moving and this is not Hemingway sex.
What was once Eastern Oregon has moved
One and half to two inches a year to northwestern Wyoming,
17 million years of bracket creep.
If this keeps up and it surely will,
Yellowstone Park will wind up in Hudson's Bay.
Meanwhile back on the ground
Each successive Resurgent Caldera as you move east
Is a little younger, more recently alarming,
Than its predecessor.
I discovered pleasure in the Jarbridge Caldera
Laying flat on my back on the wooden bed of a
2-ton flatbed Magic Valley bean truck.
I got off my back and moved to the bean bags
To break the flimsy 1965 jar.
Farther east Rick's College is
Educating Latter Day Saints
In the middle of the Rexburg Caldera.
I wonder how the Mormons rationalize this?
The Island Park Caldera is practically recent.
Yellowstone itself a mere 600,000 years young.
Since these cataclysms seem to erupt
Every 600,000 years or so
Each passing moment brings us closer to
The next Big Bang.
Two million years ago
There was a blast of rhyolite
Blown into the air
5,000 times the volume of
The 1980 eruption of Mt. Saint Helens.
There will be an ashfall
Very few will dig
Their way out from under.
If all the rhyolite between
Yellowstone and the Missouri River
Was stacked back up
In Idaho where it came from
The Snake River Plain would be as mountainous
As the rest of Idaho.
What am I driving at
Across 17 million years of
Volcanic happenstance.
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A Walk on the End of the World
Geyser Basin, Yellowstone Park, July 7, 1998
When the Yellowstone volcano blows again
And ashfall fills the northern hemisphere with darkness,
It is good that you can hear Chinese,
German, Japanese and French
On the trails to the fumaroles
Because it will be an international event
Off any scale of magnitude known to man or women.
When the Yellowstone volcano blows again
Practically astraddle the 45th parallel of latitude,
Which is to say halfway or equidistant
Between the North Pole and the Equator,
You'll watch the black band of darkness circle the sky
Until the lights go out on the weather channel
And the deep freeze begins.
When the Yellowstone volcano blows again
Much that doesn't freeze immediately
Will be invited to the famine,
Crops will fail in the field
As the distribution system delivers
Carnage and terror on a scale wider
Than a TV or movie camera lens.
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Ziggles
for Zig Knoll (1940-1997)
Tonight I read a book
By my old friend Zig
Called Dancing Girls Are Different.
Zig died last year of ovarian cancer.
We used to dance at Dino's,
A converted car showroom on south Main Street
When I was still a student
And she had learned better.
Better than the day I spent
With her and an equally
Gorgeous friend
On the nude beach at Santa Barbara?
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