Mist snakes the mountains,
 

uncoiled, unhurried.
 

                             The moon waxes and wanes.
 

              Storms
                              sometimes never come,
 

sometimes never go.

           ^^         ^

Dry soil softens
between my lips. My mouth deepens
 

into a well filled with roots.

           ^^        ^           ^^

             Call it a life, this cloak intended for our backs.
 

If this happened to us or long ago
or is someday going to happen
 

I cannot say.
 

I drink tea brewed from last summer’s flowers.
 

                                      Petals re-open
           in the pot before pouring.

                        ^^

The ditch fat with runoff,
 

              snowmelt
 

                                        un-dressing granite,
icing my hands into hooks.

^

 
                                         On the dunes,
every step shifts the surface.
 

                           All this reaching for a resting place
we likely passed years ago.
 

We sink a little even as we climb.

           ^                       ^^

Another thread unwinds.
 

                         All my reparations
made in darkness,
                         in the space in my chest
before the candles are lit.

There by the creek there is ice
                                                     and beneath ice, ripples,
 

                         then three mule deer
                         bending their heads to drink.

Copyright © 2022 by Kyce Bello. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 4, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

Subscribe to the Poem-a-Day Podcast 

  

“The little mountain glyphs between each section in ‘Far Country’ remind me of a road trip in the Southwest. As the mountainous landscape changes, the context and imagination informed by place shift with it. In this case, the poem travels to a realm between the known world and a symbolic inner geography. There, the personal, collective, and ecological merge and illuminate one another. I go there when I can.”
—Kyce Bello