SageGreenJournal.org
voices out of the West, mostly poetry, personal to planetary
Peter Anderson
Crestone, Colorado
2 by Peter Anderson
Poet, editor, author, backcountry ranger, river guide,
teaches at Adams State University
Academy of American Poets Award (Univ. of Wyo.)
Peter was poetry editor of Mountain Gazette for a few years and then involved with Pilgrimage — a Colorado literary review. He's also published a book of essays, First Church of the Higher Elevations (Ghost Road Press, Denver, 2005).
Watershed
Where you begin is never the beginning you always below the high snow fields not the beginning either and above the ocean never stays where you end is a different question the sign at the cemetery says burial permits required: please check in before you check out i am of this place now but I won’t be left in its ground drifters are water dwellers But say my ashes end up in Crestone Creek and they go under i mean we live on a rift
the Rio Grande Rift and it’s a big deep fault the water goes down and down through the blue clay and stays there a long time i mean a long time i mean the water goes down in those dark fissures to a time before dinosaurs and ice age so when my daughter says where does the creek go I say it goes to the ocean and maybe it does and maybe it doesn’t I mean there’s a lot of water down there not going anywhere anytime soon this water, these rocks take their own fine time they take their own fine time.
Querencia*
Is the space where we are most at home
The sound of the word takes me to water,
to the river maybe, the nose of a kayak in
the heart of a wave, as it spills over a ledge
curls back upstream, crests and falls again
crests and falls again and holds the boat
in place, as long as I dip paddle and rudder,
keeping to the sweet spot, where the up
and down currents meet, where there is
stillness in motion, where I am held letting
the sun slivered water slide by on the glassy
edge of a hole in the river. Dwell as water
on water, blood on blood, surf the heart
of it all. You are here, says querencia.
in this body, on this river, you are here.
* Querencia = favorite spot, in Spanish