Clade Song 6
Clade Song 6 Left

Clade Song 6

Pockets Of Detail, Unsurrounded,
(A Bear Circled Our Camp All Night)

 

Rain filtered through rock
re-emerging from rock,
with trees dwarfed, splayed—
a stumble, then, and a twisting
thought, ‘as the body may be said

to think.’ Singing all night
off-key, to calm my horse,
other horse tangled up in a picket rope
—she always does that, silly girl—
for a mountain can take you

out of yourself, or in.
Remember that day,
the three of us going single-file
as we turned along the shelf-trail,
joined by a fourth—a bighorn ram

trailing us out of his territory,
like an usher seeing
unruly guests to the door.
Pseudo-narcissus, narcissus, they grow
so close together above the trail.

 

 

 

 
Clade Song 6 Right
Tichy Susan Tichy is the author of five books, most recently Trafficke (Ahsahta Press, 2015), a mixed-form meditation on family, race, history, and the powers of language. Her previous Ahsahta books are Gallowglass (2010) and Bone Pagoda (2007). She teaches in the BFA & MFA programs at George Mason University, and when not teaching lives in Colorado, in an owner-built, passive-solar cabin at 9000 feet in the western foothills of the Sierra Mojada/Wet Mountains, facing the Wet Mountain Valley and the Colorado Sangre de Cristo range. “Pockets of Detail, Unsurrounded” and “Small Volcano of a Mushroom Pushing through Soil” are from a new manuscript, The Avalanche Path in Summer.