Dear David --

When we were getting to know each other in Colorado, I remember being surprised that you hadn't experienced much direct personal grief. I know you had lost your grandfathers and maybe I am forgetting some things, but I remember you saying that you hadn't had a lot of death in your life. I guess my way of defining grief was limited at that time. I was surprised because the feeling I got from you was similar to what I sensed in people who had had a lot of those experiences. There was a tenderness, an attention in you, a sadness even.

The more time we spent together -- being outside, talking about the west, about the earth, its geology and creatures, the landscapes we came from and who surrounded those landscapes, what kind of thinking -- the more struck I was by a center place we seemed to have, despite having come at that center place from two pretty different sides. Of the west, literally, two different sides of the Rockies, and also of "ideology" or background. Mine being somehow one of a relative "city kid" whose experiences of being outside were usually "recreational" (though that feels reductive ... the hills and their trails so close to the house I grew up in, so part of my daily surroundings) and yours being more rural, work-rooted, but also from a weird sort of rurality interrupted constantly by a certain kind of rarified wealth/extractive orientation toward place (a tension I've come to understand much more directly now that my parents live in Hailey).

WHAT I AM VERY CIRCUITOUSLY GETTING AT IS: we both had/have a depth of relationship with "nature" similar to the kind of relationship one tends to have with a beloved person. And with that an expanding sense of grief. Around climate change, certainly, but it feels more specific than that. And more complicated. Maybe both more specific and larger. A sense beyond the senses. To do with people but not just. It was NINE years ago that we met and started having these conversations. When I think about that time and some of the poems I wrote, I realize that I was writing into a space of crisis that was still more theoretical than actual -- in terms of ecosystem loss, etc. -- still more future than present. Of course it WAS happening then, but now it is impossible not to notice, makes itself known nearly every day with a new extreme weather event, a new virus.

Not sure what I'm trying to get at here ... just a starting place, some attempt at "context." I feel like there is way more to say about each of our relations to these things and what those are now, how they have shifted or evolved in more recent years. I want to say more but I also want to send this to you because it's taken me so long and I'd rather get your voice in here than continue to project generally onto each of our past selves. Maybe there are some things here to respond to, though, some language I've used or assumptions I've made that you'd want to trouble a bit. Maybe we start writing some poems or sending photos, or just start asking some questions and trying to answer them.

I keep thinking about this poem lately so I wanted to put it here. I wrote it in Pingree after we went fishing once. I look at it now and think about the imagined future inside it, how much I didn't know (gas $2.08? what). But also how much I did, some other kind of knowing, well beyond conscious thought.

POEM MEANT TO BE ABOUT STARS

we drive cold morning me reading

Niedecker who writes like my grandmother

The North is one vast, massive, glorious

corruption of rock and language she says

and I think not North but West

not Michigan but Idaho but Colorado

pulling into Pingree a little snow

dust on the Mummy Range

you tell me about cutthroat

meaning fish meaning hardly any left

today’s gas $2.08 per gallon

the roughnecks gone

dirty magazines burning

a trail behind them

how much time have we spent staring into water

how will we explain glaciers to children

once my father has died

I will not look at snow

I don’t have to do anything

the wind is loud in the pines

Love you miss you

--CL



 P.S. I want to add this too -- wrote it before I left Hailey. Maybe a better example of how my relation to "nature" has shifted since the poem in the email than trying to write sentences about it. I feel so wrecked by this fire season. OKAY THAT'S IT.

Walking house to where the fire burned, layer of smoke over / canyon from somewhere else, six magpies scream for one dead on the road.

Meadowlark, quail cloud, four crows before rusted / tower lines. Cattle guard balance beam, shotgun shell dry grasses color, no sign to tell me

not to go. Quiet I try to understand how wind sweeps ridges — / burns in stripes & gestures not one mass of charcoal like I thought.

In language David explains heat — brush vs. trees — & I see us fall Colorado / depth of black, split rocks crumbling our hands: “walked through gone burn / trying to fit the moon in.”

Here, skeletons of sage brush where there is anything / but ash or left behind beer bottles still intact. I pour some water

in a circle, see gray body walking patterns up / the hill palms pressed to ground like poems I wrote when I felt

but did not know. Cool & silence filters lightbulb sun & I / want running. Far into canyon place where

several times in weeks before I sat to learn clouds with my eyes closed. Slow / I imagine each step’s root system, x-ray underground.

Thought I would cry but the sense is beyond that. More / stone than river — cathedral, ruins, cemetery, core of earth, gravity pull.

What the fire tucked inside my shoulder releases anyway, thread coaxed out by light / & wind invisible with nothing moving to show. In the days after,

my heart did not break for ownership, for ideas / of possession, was not angry with storm sent lightning electric down

wandered instead through destruction dreams, limitless scorch / until rain cold winter, snow mixed ash together

floating. This morning I am not afraid but a melting into questions of child / breath lost in summer. Present:

new fire sparks a ridge behind. Planes again & sirens walk me back / to find a different word for future.

——

Glendale Fire
Hailey, ID
September 2024

---

Something in you asking me to talk with you about this project made me immediately think of Poem Meant to Be About Stars. I remember reading it for a workshop and my letter basically being that it kicked ass, and was already basically a perfect poem. Being there when you wrote it felt like a blessing , talking about your two-placeness coming together in your head and heart, the struggle you were with being away from Idaho and the NW, but knowing your CO roots. Then writing this incredible almost sonnet in a moment of writing when I swear I spent mostly trying to remember names of tree species. Reading it, it made me want to put more of my immediate heart and being into my poems, something I always get from your poems.

I feel like our unending conversation about the west, our own constructions of it, our own places and where we fit with it, have already been deep and endless -  a worthy conversation talking about land, our own histories, it's large looming colonial terror, its extraction, how to continue existing here, what our work is here. From the heart of Boise to the center of North Routt County, and a butchered phrase of Matt Truslow, it's a large fucked apart thing, and the more we think and write it, the more we are a part of it. There is so much more to dive into our ideas of the west - a quintessential unpacking of what the whole west really is -  the suburbs these small cities, the dark larches and firs of the woods, the tiny mountain communities and the snow that buries them, the loggers that eak a living out far from city centers, and how tech workers take over places that once had nothing but ranches and a mill. It's hard to restart these talks, it feels generic to start again the ideas we once talked through all the time.

To not only speak in the general, i wanted to describe a forest grief that I've had over the past few seasons in a part of our forest that burned in the early 00's. I barely remember that summer, but I would have just been 9 and a large fire burned by my house. It ran into the wilderness, and torched drainages of some old growth (for CO) engelman spruce, and I remember the hubbub of dudes in yellows, lots of trucks, helicopters in the air and closed roads.

Now I walk that drainage maintaining trail every year, and I think of the mundaneness of earth history living in the mundane moments of my life. The trail is called Scotts Run, which is from some story of an old trapper running from a grizzly down the drainage, a bear that no longer exists in the state (trapped and killed). And then there is a stand of ghost dead trees, no bark, and when the wind picks up they sing a ghastly dirge, and sway. The trees are large old skeletons of large englemans, an example of large trees in CO where it usually only grows 15" pine trees. They burned in that fire, and there's little regrowth. But there's starting to be aspen regrowing after 20 years. In order for spruce/fir forests to grow, they need shade. This means before it was a spruce forest, it was an old aspen forest or lodgepole. After 150 years of that, spruce could start and then grew to be 300-400 years old at times. And now, in its burnt out state, it starts to regrow aspens.

A moment of being there is 500-600 years of forest, far older than this country. Now the forest here is mostly dead but is coming back. It's also a hallmark of what the west is. To hear that windsong and trees creak took so much time and water and life. And it is all in one moment, me hauling a saw to cut deadfall, and digging drains, thinking about what it took for the wind to make these haunting sounds, a forest now made of ancient ghosts, and the trees that will shepherd other forests that will become ancient again - if those aren't completely unwound by climate change. Likely they are. This likely will happen completely differently, and I don't know how to think about it.

Nature wise, this is happening everywhere. And you see it more than I do in the firescape of Idaho that burns so frequently and is so susceptible to slope and wind and ignition. I've become quite longwinded, and I'm sorry. Your hailey fire poem is great. I'm sorry you and your fam has bee living with it, but as you know its so prevalent and expected now. It's no less haunting.

I'm up cutting christmas trees in Montana again right now with my uncle. His family has been doing it for almost 100 years now, which is wildly layered in terms of hard ass work, a weird christian/pagan holiday, and what it takes to live here. It feels good to be in the woods and be apart of it, but I'm also tired of dragging the same 8ft doug fir to the truck. It's gorgeous. The larch are turning yellow, and the hillsides and mountains are turning yellow and green. Tops of ranges are catching white in these slumpy rains in the valley.

I attached a poem I wrote a few years ago about treein with bob, and the works/life of Caravaggio. The light in these woods and in his paintings I swear are the same. Would love to hear your thoughts about it. Would love to keep talking about the west and grief and the woods with you more. Sorry I wasn't more brief.

Miss you, love you
D

drastic light

Caravaggio would light models with
lamps from above in an otherwise
dark studio, painting pure subject, the prostitutes,
beggars, and street boys that he turned into saints
in that godlight. “The Conversion of St Paul,”
a horse dripping with lamplight, its muscle
practically flickering a fly off its leg, its massive shape
over half the painting and Saint Paul bucked to the ground.
the buyer, angry, blasphemed, asked
if the horse was supposed to be god, and
Caravaggio, that rebel jackass, replied no,
he stands in god’s light – all else
in the scene near black, the saint and the horse godlit.
some critics say his backgrounds lack any attention, or
detail, so dark it practically doesn’t exist, it is
almost not the painting at all.

watching the pink sun rise through
the grate of the headache rack
we drive into the larches and
doug firs of northwest Montana to tree all day,
hoping if we can get enough cut we’ll finish
for the season. the orange of the Stihl 440
is dampened in the cargo light, the can of gas and
chain oil chiaroscuro, the bows of green barely there,
the dome light glowing on the needles’ tips,
the black forest unlit in the predawn.
beeswax hangs on the air, fresh boot grease, and the
sugar of pine sap flood the cab –
the ochre taste of sawgas lingering
in those seats from when Bob’s dad
was a gyppo logger, driving this truck all around
Lincoln County to turn logs and
Christmas trees into money, how
everyone here survived back then.

in one of his last works, Goliath’s head
held by his black curly hair in David’s hand, the darkness
illuminating him, the horrific godlight on
Goliath’s drooping face – the bright fear of Caravaggio’s
beheading as the pope put a bounty on him for
murdering a man, perhaps over a lover or
a gambling debt. he paints Goliath as himself, a horrified self
portrait, jaw slacked, teeth bared, eyes drooping below
his own dark hair, dead, a debt paid
in paint so glowing it looks like it is sprinkled
with the dust of crushed fireflies. did he need to
see his greatest fears as himself?
is what we see in the truck’s headlights illumined
beauty? the rest is practically not there, if you look hard
in this moment I’m holding – that holds us.

the pickup, a hazel brown ’88 Power Ram, bench seat,
4-speed, whines in low first as it crawls
the old logging roads on the way back
to the end of the half section
where Stoltze Lumber bought a piece of
Bob’s Uncle’s land, thinned it up, left
too much slash on the ground. the sky grew
golden in the rising light, my uncle humming The Sound
of Silence, Simon and Garfunkel, as whitetail
run out from our headlights – only does,
haven’t seen any bucks this season. he talks as we drive
about an airshow, with WWII planes, when the P51 Mustang
finally left the ground, how it bent skyward like
a homesick angel. if we can be betrayed by beauty,
it happens right after you notice it’s gone, that
this forest, these songs, what light,
happens in moments, but life is not moments.

we breathe into our coffee cups on the hood
in the graying dawn, the saw spitting exhaust
across the ground like a ghost as the frost warms,
drips. running from the law, days away from a pardon,
Caravaggio was detained at harbor, and watched the ship
full of his paintings sail away, and he chased it, sick, on foot,
heartbroken in the summer heat of Italy, and it killed him.
we go ahead, eyes up to the treetops looking
for that perfect shape, how the perfect Christmas trees
will have their limbs up like the arms of a dancer
holding the air together.

---

Dear David --

Well now it's almost Christmas & there is a tree in my living room & maybe you cut it. I don't know how it's taken me so long to write this email but I guess "so long" is relative. Something has shifted for me over the past year or so, I think, especially when it comes to email & all of a sudden I look up & it's been two months. I do feel like I've been writing to you in my mind this whole time, though. & when we started writing I didn't anticipate how much the work I'm doing during this residency would feel so part of what I want to be talking with you about. I didn't anticipate how much the land would be involved, how much I would feel in collaboration with it & in complete debt to it.

& maybe that is a good way to try & articulate what has shifted for me since writing that fish tree snow poem however many years ago. When I wrote it, I think my grief was more centered around landscape & nostalgia -- the idea of my children not experiencing snow, etc. -- & fear, I guess, trying to fill in a dark picture with something just so it wasn't totally unknown unimaginable etc.. Now, & what this residency work is really bringing to bear for me, the sensation is more along the lines of urgent gratitude toward the land ... or like NEED in all caps like one might feel the need for a lover in the beginning of love or how one might need a parent during childhood. Doing this work, which I guess is art but&also feels more like a spiritual undertaking (which we hope art is, I suppose ... I do, anyway), I am understanding how much I NEED the foothills, I NEED the river & the trees & the sky. Am understanding how they have held me & allowed me to metabolize time & experience & like extreme instances of premature death to be specific. I am actively in work with these entities right now for these releases I'm doing, but I think the realization is also retroactive. Looking back from here at my younger self & how I was unconsciously being shepherded through grief & difficulty by this place (& the waters & ferns & giant mountains around Seattle, the greens & flowers of Portland, the rocks below the reservoir in Fort Collins that I used to lay on when I was going out of my mind) & feeling now like I should just be kissing this ground forever & ever, finding some way to say thank you. Basically, just walking by the river a lot of days knowing for sure that I could not live here if it was gone. & what do I do about that.

My greatest hope is that I AM doing a version of that with this project, though it is probably a human ego delusion to think such a thing. I was looking up maps of Idaho's river system yesterday & it looks so much like human blood vessels I could just die. Have you ever seen the illustration of Idaho shaped like an old woman? It's kind of great. The circulatory river system images from yesterday laid over that childhood image + reading about how much water has gone over the past 100 years = more crying hoping my tears do something useful for this earth. I've been finding it very difficult not to project/personify with all of these natural entities these past weeks, which I feel in poetry school we were taught not to do but that directive feels pretty colonial too ... to tell people to remove personal emotional definition from another being/entity/etc that they have direct experience with. However, I've been thinking about that a lot, too. Who am I, white person, to be doing this work ostensibly with the land I am wrongly located in. One fact is, however, that I AM located in it NOW. Am I supposed to divorce myself from that connection? Isn't it better to feel a depth of care & astonishment & exchange with this place instead of being afraid of engaging because I might do something wrong? I like what you said in your email about the mundaneness of earth time & that kind of thinking reminds me to take the long long view of things. In a lot of ways, the work I'm doing is maybe an effort to heal what white people have done to themselves here -- to settle & build infrastructure in this valley that for thousands of years was a place to move through, to heal & honor, but then to leave. The steady stream of tragedy that's played out since white people got here & specifically the threads of tragedy I'm aware of or connected to, starting in the early 1900s, & the way they spread through families & groups of friends, contagion of suicide & addiction & violence. Feels sort of like that's what we get for taking those healing waters & using them to heat our houses.

I sense that I am ranting now so I will let that go but maybe we can talk about it all more on the phone someday. I feel so at odds with language right now (written language in particular), or like it's just not it, you know? I really would rather give a person an object or touch them on the shoulder or look at them while I cry & hope that whatever was meant to pass between us has. But I guess I do get to do that in some sense. I just really want to turn the poem leaf back over & feel at home in them again & I'm not sure what it will take for that to happen. That said: I remember your Carravagio poem too & how good it was. Didn't we look at that one in workshop? I think I remember Dan saying a bunch of Dan stuff about it & feeling like we were all inside the Sistine Chapel or looking at a giant fresco, drooling together over the light. & so I am reminded of what language CAN do. Maybe reading is the answer, then. I was sort of stranded in my studio for a couple of hours waiting for someone yesterday & I reread most of Hydra Medusa ... Brandon Shimoda's newer book of poems that came out last spring, I think. Have you read it? I think what he's doing with different forms in there is what I need from language right now. Malleability, an absence of rules. I think you would like The Grave on the Wall, too, if you haven't read it. I don't know why I'm so obsessed with his work, but I am pretty sure that if I only had him & Clarice for the rest of my life, I'd be fine.

Okay, the sun is out. I think it's probably muddy, but I'm going to drive up toward Bogus Basin & let Release 1 go all the way. I'm sorry if this email reads like a mess ... I've just been wanting to respond so badly & also needing to articulate what's been kicking around in my brain, even if insufficiently, so here we are. Give me about 20 minutes & I'll be waving at you from my side of this large fucked apart thing.

Love you
--CL


P.S. It hit 59 degrees here yesterday for the first time since 1917.

---

Dear CL,

But another terrible month and its -15 here today. I, too, am in that state of life that I look down and its been a month since I responded to email. I think its good though, just slow. Maybe its just what email is supposed to be, that by the time you hear from me again the world will be different again, and we will still be here. Or its just like mail mail, and I think we both appreciate that.

Hearing that you had a christmas tree again this year always makes me happy. A special kind of sadness is reserved for plastic christmas trees, or worse, none at all. Bringing the forest into our homes, bring the greenery of it into our lives, its sacred. It seems like that sacredness is at the heart of what your needs of the earth are through this project right now, and the harsh reality of trying to experience the sacred earth, to be a part of it, and have little ways to do so in our culture, in our lives. Of course, how grief and presence has shaped our lives, and the earth we live on too. And how much we do NEED it. I know that you feel that greatly, a physical need of the world around you,  a proprioception of emotion of the other living things that make it possible to be alive in the world, whether that's Portland roses, the Boise river, or snow falling on snow, spruces and firs on the ridges and in the canyons of these places.

I hope that as you have gone through your grief releases and new phases of your project and residency, you feel that you have been giving that thanks to the land. I think that is something I dont do enough of. I spend so much time outside for work, that many times it passes me by. And then something hits when I'm out there, a change in weather, a miracle of light or an animal, and I'm immediately reminded how special it is to see all of this alive, to be there. And I think we were taught to avoid that, or to ascribe it to just petty human feeling that does nothing. Of course, it's not the earth's feelings, earth's grief or elation, but it is all that we have to know that we are HERE, we are part of the world, we can't eat by being on the internet, we can't grow food from just talking in the void, we owe the world our presence because we owe ourselves it too. That's a weight we should feel, but it's harder to feel in our world. I don't think I'm describing it with enough justice, and certainly not to the degree you've given that in all of your work and art across the years. I don't know how to tie it to all the violence, the loss, and grief. I'm with you though, it sits with you in the land you are in. It's a part of that. But perhaps that colonial effort to only extract, rather than restore, in that sense, is what you're trying to touch - and how do we do that? And especially with our history, our own extractions. America everywhere is kind of like a steady stream of tragedy - heavier stream right now, slower in other times.

I don't know dude. It's fuckin hard out, everything right now is difficult. I'm having trouble with writing too, maybe talking it out on the phone soon would be better. But thanks for your kind words about my Caravaggio poem. I wrote it after grad school, but memories are all messy anyway - it did make me think of Dan talking about a poem someone made about a frescoe or something, which I think definitely happened. I haven't read Brandon's new book, but i'll check it out. I haven't felt the same kinship with his work, but reading it always reminds me of your poems. I just got a posthumous book by Franz Wright, and I think you'd love it, all fragmented and beautiful. I'll send you some. I recently heard from Ed in a very brief Facebook hello, which was very nice, and made me wish i stayed in touch with the poem world more. I think i'll try harder this year to participate, to submit, and write and send stuff to people. We'll get there.

I hope the snow has been falling for you. I hope winter is finding its way into your earthbrain, and that Grey has been skiing in it. I've been wanting to write about snow the way I've been able to write about the forest here, but it always escapes me, and I just think snow falling on snow. But i do think that phrase is beautiful, and that's probably fine for now. Phone hang sometime soon. Slow email too. Sun is about to set here, and I am going to take pictures of the light on the town.

Missyouloveyoubye,
David