Yellowstone
We follow directions. We keep to the path.
We check gate traffic and let motorhomes merge.
They buy trinkets and postcards. They eat franks
with forks and with knives. We drink Moose Drool.
We suffer the bugs and live like we’re wolves.
This mud reeks of eggs. It owes us some lives.
Who’d think to blame us? Who’d dare diverge?
We keep to the path. Men in hip-waders trudge out
to perform their fresh selves, swish-swishing
caddis-flies, nymphs it took two winters to tie.
They overlook brooktrout levitating at heel.
We follow directions. We keep to the path.
Numbered, endless people come with plates
from Alberta, shirts from Daytona, to fill pews
in plain sight of a geyser. One book to prepare
you for the place claims ash will reach Jersey,
that Portland shall fall as pumice to the sea.
The statehouse may yet sign the bill into law,
though in private admits gray wolves commit
blessed few acts of predation; dead lambs
and dead cows make for really bad optics.
These our woods, deadly, dark and deep,
where amphibious men finessing fake bugs
look past the rainbows inside wet shadows.
We follow directions and keep to the path.
The path here is stilted, contrived of metal
and wood, so wherever you walk, it’s a good
three inches above the dirt where you tread.
A 2017-2019 Wallace Stegner Fellow, J.P. Grasser holds a Ph.D. from the University of Utah, where he edited Quarterly West. The winner of the Academy of American Poets’s inaugural Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize and Frontier Poetry’s 2019 Open Prize, he has recent poems appearing in AGNI, Poets.org, Ploughshares, Narrative, and The Gettysburg Review, among others. He tends Zephyr Ridge Farm in New Hampshire and serves as an associate editor for 32 Poems.
Header photo by Adam Derewecki, courtesy Pixabay. Photo of Grant Clauser by Alex Cope.
