Once it was a gradual thing to leave a place. Today a whoosh and everything is gone—
the Rocky Mountains with their snowy glaciers melting into lakes and rivers, preternaturally blue-green, the skinny spruce and fir trees threaded tightly in a tapestry, the unseen presence of black bears and wolves and wolverines—
all disappeared, and we are back among our shaven hills, beside our faded bay, as if the startling waters and the castellated mountains never were.
And yet they are. Somewhere in a country we can’t see, glaciers still are blending into clouds and melting to the earth without us standing on the shore of Lake Moraine, amazed.
Joyce Schmid is a grandmother and psychotherapist living in Palo Alto, California, with her husband of over half a century. Her recent work has appeared in Poetry Daily, Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, Antioch Review and other journals and anthologies.
