Buffalo Trace

We didn't get to drive through "where the buffalo roam" this summer, 

for the first time in a long time.

But once, in Theodore Roosevelt's Badlands, 

this fellow was just resting beside the road. 

I took the photo through the car window and altered it later. 

I was struck by his immense and powerful quietness.

Buffalo Trace

Sometimes in the winter mountains
after a little snow has blown in the night
and nothing's alive in eye-range
but the clouds
near peaks frozen clean
in the solstice sun
the white finds a faint depression
to stick in out of wind
and makes visible for the first time
through woods and along the slopes
to where it nicks the rim
perceptibly, a ghostpath
under brush and broomsedge,
merging in the pasture with narrow
cowtrails but running on through fences
and across boundaries, under branches
in tattered sweep out to the low
gaps of the old migrations
where they browsed into the summer mountains
then ebbed back into the horizon
and back of the stars.

Robert Morgan

The Strange Attractor; new and selected poems,
Louisiana State University Press, 2004, page 77.

Robert Morgan is another poet I found through the book of North Carolina Poets!
I am still reading through his poems because he writes the kind of poetry
that is very appealing to me. I think I will pack this book and take it with me
back to California.

Notice the compound words he has made: ghostpath,
broomsedge and cowtrails. Spell Check pointed them out for me. I LOVE
this sort of compounding in a poem!