The urge is neither
pure nor right.
It is
simply
motion
or desire for
motion, rising
like a dream of Pacific wave trains
shoaling over
tiered pale mesas: a metaphor
that, like all
metaphors, couples and rides
a fat dream
of some absent addition.
It might be purely
a name. Wyoming,
a gerund
for the self
-pitying, flapping flame
resolving
the problem of excess
pressure deep in
the gas fields.
For the attributed
cold of
open-car piles
of porous coal, sliding
heavy-rough across
the sagebrush.
Expose
a child to a particular
environment at his
susceptible time, and he
will perceive
in the shapes of that
environment until he dies—Stegner’s sentence
condemning
my seeing in everything
the slope-shifting
swells and hollows of the same
gray sea. I am wasting
my life, I tell
you one night. If
you never asked
to be born, you reply
how can you
owe anything. To anyone.
Elizabeth Wyatt is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Irvine. Her research, along with much of her creative work, considers gender and the “wild” in the U.S. West.
*Photo by Carol M. Highsmith/Library of Congress.
