1.
The forest is its own lyric,
gully mud and quartz,
slow moose spondees
bursting and sinking.

2.
What’s left of a miner’s cabin is
the whole story—peeled log walls
spilling into meadow, a roof sagging
to dirt floor, wooden bunk beds, a table,
a bench. It’s a man’s story
told with Hemingway’s syntax
except for a narrow shelf above a single bed,
perhaps a convenience for glasses and a book,
or maybe the only truth of dreams
protected with a knife and a bottle.

3.
I understand going west with plans
too vague for maps and blueprints.
I fell in love with pasqueflowers and antelope,
fences and highway miles through mountain basins.
Staying spent my cash, most of my faith, bits of tissue and fat.
I tossed forgiveness like horseshoes and sometimes won.
But need is too short a word.
What happens to a lonely body
is its own history of greed.

4.
The trees are losing needles and bark.
Beetles bore mazes on dead wood standing.
They cast hillsides in rusty shadows
while picas eep for mates
before the first sparks fall.

5.
I walk all day not for abandoned gold or
receding reservoirs or Medicine Bow burning.
I return to a pond on the other side of
a willow thicket where a moose drinks
in late afternoon. Somedays I think
I’ll run into myself, decades younger,
learning to name columbine and fireweed.
Somedays I don’t believe I was ever without.
After the last mile, I peel away boots and socks
and step into the icy creek. My skin smells of forest
fires already dimming tonight’s birds and bear.

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Diane LeBlanc is a writer, teacher, and book artist with roots in Vermont, Wyoming, and Minnesota. She is the author of The Feast Delayed (Terrapin Books, 2021) and four poetry chapbooks. Poems and essays appear in Bellevue Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Mid-American Review, RockPaperPoem, Southern Humanities Review, and Sweet Lit, among others. Diane is a holistic life coach with emphasis in creativity practice. She is a professor and writer in residence at St. Olaf College. Read more at www.dianeleblancwriter.com.

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