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— After a go to to the Yaak Valley in Kootenai Nationwide Forest, Montana, the place the U.S. Forest Service has introduced a logging undertaking referred to as Black Ram

What’s there to be finished now, however enter
              towards abandonment, develop into a hole sound

within the halo of labyrinthine inexperienced, develop into a crossed-
             out phrase on the again of somebody’s hand.

As soon as, all of this grew to become

             all of this. One not-yet-golden western larch
curves by a white pine, a white pine

             curves by a western hemlock, nobody right here
is heroic. To enter right here is to enter

magnitude, to really feel an ecstatic somethingness,
             a nothingness of your personal identify.

All phrases develop into fallacious. An entire world exists
             with out us. However who’s us?

Lichen, moss, grizzly scat, moose hoofprint like two
             exclamation factors by the drying frog pond.

How have you learnt you’re alive? What proof
             will you allow? So many myths

are unraveling; a yellow swallowtail glides by over
             the sinless creek mattress. A storm

wets the pores and skin and we’re shocked now we have
             pores and skin. Woods’ rose, white-flowered rhododendron,

nothing right here is unfinished. What it gave me? I noticed
             a brand new tree emerge out of a floor manufactured from historical bushes

on prime of extra historical bushes, on prime of extra historical bushes,
             on prime of extra historical bushes, and understood then

that this was how the Earth was made.

This poem seems within the October 2023 print version.

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