Reading Room

Fields widen out to prairie,
prairie spreads to open plains,
the Front Range starts up as a bank of clouds
and slowly builds its wall of stone.

The shack’s one room is wallpapered
with pages of the Denver Post
a decorative soul
glued up in 1939.

We slept there forty years ago,
a passing symmetry
I try to keep in focus
like a pale moon drooping from a limb.

The limb, the mule deer, and the Steller’s jay,
which, rummaging through scrub, has stopped to preen,
compose themselves like type that carries news
still read by lanterns fueled by kerosene.