I lived four years in the high desert mountains
of New Mexico, the ranch house ringed
by variegated greens of piñon pine,
cedar and Ponderosa, and beyond the forest
lay fields of sage, their silver-gray shimmer
unbroken but for wind, the dark shadows
of ravens, and the occasional red-tail hawk,
magpie, the small, shy kestrel or flash
of a flicker, but never once did I spy
a sage grouse scuttling among the bushes;

If it can be eaten, someone will shoot it.
If it stirs, it is a target.
If it trusts, it is gone.

And what can one say that the land
doesn’t already know; its centuries of plunder,
its beauty still bowing to the steady aim of want;

In Maine, I knew another sound, the woodcock,
rising in spiral flight, a corkscrew hymn to dusk;
now even that small ecstasy is mostly memory;
The men who loved the woods took what they could
until there was little left but deer ticks and stories;
pelts once hung like flags along back sheds and porches,
the bodies discarded as offal, sacrifice without prayer,
one of the oldest, emptiest rituals we know;

And what to say about all of this, really;
the land keeps listening, the wind passes through sage,
through pine, through silence; each season
the breathing slows, the voices grow fewer,
and still,the earth forgives; and somewhere perhaps,
a single grouse remains, holding the whole sorrow
of us in its fragile breast.

Sage and piñons of New Mexico, circa 1989 ~ bj