Standing in Place in Yellowstone

Commonweal, Jan 17, 2003 by Dixie Partridge

Standing in Place in Yellowstone

   Through the steam of warm pools
   shapes recede ... emerge
   in low sunlight, pastel
   at the edge of mist.
   Buffalo.

   They stand in shaggy non-chalance--
   browns and sables, gray--
   only yards from where we watch.
   The air is an ancient hue, heavy
   with moisture and the breath
   of beasts, their mammoth-
   spirits against black trunks of trees
   defoliated by core heat of earth.
   Autumn, and the altitude
   had chilled.
   Behind us
   the crater-filled lake flows
   into a yawn of canyons.

   When snows come, this spot
   will absorb winter as if it were
   an aberration--blizzards to vapor
   along the high divide.
   And that sense of waiting ...
   for something slow but imminent,
   will be what we carry back, what is developed
   with the mystery of photographs,
   what rises in us like magma
   as the memory of our geologic  span
   flickers ... single small flurry
   that made our brief winters.