Four Corners Postcards - Colorado

Everything is gold in Silverton,
even the blue butterflies
and the columbine
from which the sky is but a dye.

Even the shadows here
are different, more alive.

The gold of Grandfather Fire replaces pine with aspen
And it too turns from silver into gold
left to float in autumn afternoons

before the eyes of would-be pioneers
whose lives beyond the foothills
involve children and careers.

But here we can be Norwegian,
with long dresses and unruly beards,
knitting nets and slapping paint
on old fisherman's shacks
in the nape of the Himalayas.







Here
we can turn
into goats,
and bound
on up the
mountains,
above the
treelines,
reach
nearer,
we think,
to the sky.

But there's that matter
of all the valleys,
the deep blue lakes,
the red-iron peaks,
the wrinkled crags of rock,

The corkscrews and hairpins
and knife edge turns in the dirt







To ghost towns
without ghosts,
just skeletons of spruce,
cabins where once miners lay,
only a black and white
Stellar's Jay
lives here now,
where there were

400 mines, 32 taverns and Main Street painted with roses.



They're through lancing
earth's boils for gold,
done releasing
cadmium, arsenic and lead
into the headwaters.

The boilers at 12,000 feet
brought in by mule teams
were hauled away as scrap
for the war, sent down
like the ore

to the mesmerizing hydraulics of the water
that nourishes cities, the Animus river,
cold as the truth, they stained white.







By day
miners from Wales
dug for secrets
inside
the feminine earth

By night
they gave them
up
to Scottish
prostitutes.

The beads
on the lanterns
still shimmer
in the pink
bordello windows
drawn with lace
like swollen eyes
at the awestriking beauty.

Purple, purple against the golden fire!