Standing in Place in Yellowstone
Partridge, Dixie
Standing in Place in Yellowstone Through the steam of warm pools shapes recede... emerge in low sunlight, pastel at the edge of mist. Buffalo. They stand in shaggy non-chalance- browns and...
...Behind us the crater-filled lake flows into a yawn of canyons...
...single small flurry that made our brief winters...
...When snows come, this spot will absorb winter as if it were an aberration-blizzards to vapor along the high divide...
...The air is an ancient hue, heavy with moisture and the breath of beasts, their mammoth-spirits against black trunks of trees defoliated by core heat of earth...
...Autumn, and the altitude had chilled...
...Dixie Partridge...
...for something slow but imminent, will be what we carry back, what is developed with the mystery of photographs, what rises in us like magma as the memory of our geologic span flickers...
...And that sense of waiting...
...They stand in shaggy non-chalance- browns and sables, gray- only yards from where we watch...
Vol. 130 • January 2003 • No. 1
