Chin on sandstone
She turns her head to see
The sky running toward her €”
The last sun on the last water.
Who can count the knots in the braid?
Through the cottonwoods
Mourning doves’ blue ballads purl:
Coo-ahh, hoo-hoo-hoo.
Day lifts from the mesa.
Stars bloom unevenly:
White hyacinths
Through pewter snow.
She stands to go
Where friends have grown a fire.
At a bend she startles a flock of doves
That rises whistling one winged note.
Wilderness Interface Zone 
While I’m not sure whether or not this poem is finished, Moab Poets and Writers picked it up for their upcoming newsletter, where they feature writing from their members. (That will be two times in a row for me—they picked up a bit from my novel The Pictograph Murders for the last newsletter.)
Since I gave the poem away there, I thought I’d give it away here, too.
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Thanks for sharing, Patricia. I especially like this line: “The sky running toward her.” It conveys something of the overwhelming sense that Nature is never far away from us, yet, at the same time, it’s a somewhat elusive force beyond our immediate control—though we can, slowly, surely, I thing, come to a point of communion with and within it, as “Woman in Twilight” attempts.
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Thanks for reading the poem, Tyler. “The sky running toward her” describes, as you say, a sudden and often overwhelming vision of the depths into which we are immersed in the nature and force of this world and its surrounds. Your thought about the “elusive force” of—well, I guess it would be creation—being something beyond our control, yet we can join with it in moments like these—I like that.
There are places in this earth where I have gone often, places where I have “come to a point of communion” bearing a special degree of intimacy. I feel recognized and welcome in these places. This is not to say that the ants won’t sting me if I step on their anthill or the mice won’t use my tent like a trampoline at night, jumping on it, keeping me awake. That’s all part of the intimacy, I suppose. But these are places where I have a sense that not only do they affect me deeply but my presence affects them.
Pathetic fallacy or the actuality? Best, I think, and most meaningful to act as if it’s actuality.
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