Claudia Putnam

Backcountry

Corniced bowls hunched against
the west wind, the lateral snow,
the pillow of spruce below. This was
our territory. We skinned through wind-
packed drifts, limber pine krumholtz
grabbing sleeves and long hair.

I believe this land knew you. We laid
our skis on swept-bare tundra and leapt
into powder. Your son said this is what
killed you. These bowls. The Indian
Peaks. The wind and the flung snow.
Lion tracks, the trees you knew by name,

by heart: limber, whitebark, juniper,
spruce, curling in your chakras.

Niwot Ridge, where your husband
made his home, turbines spinning
to catch the power—Niwot Ridge,
sliced against the wind, is what
laid in your cancer, said your son.
Children know everything, and nothing.

Your son is dead now, suicided. Exit
bag drawn over his head. Where are
you? Do you welcome him now? In life,
this would have destroyed you. Sastrugi drifts
bury the lichens and tundra grasses
you always wanted me to be able

to name. I never did learn them,
or the names of the birds.  

We were not the keen observers
we thought we were. Your husband read
your journals, named your other illness
posthumously. Your son and I resisted.
You were a poet, sensitive, visionary.
You and I, so proud of our poetic

instability. We thought the world so sick.
Our husbands so controlling. Your son
thought your husband so controlling,
the world so sick. We were daughters
of wilderness, jumpers of cornices,
fabulistas. I envied your turns,

your aura dancing in spindrift, our shadows
lost in the darker shade of the ridge.

This bowl was our secret. You wanted me
to name everything but this. I always
believed this land knew you. After
your death, your son’s death, I went
to doctors of my own. We loved this wilderness,
but what drew us together was illness. I know

the name for it now. It’s what the husbands
always said. My avalanche beacon pulses.
No one up here to seek it. Just me,
my dogs, and the wind. My skis whispering
after yours. Wind-hurled pellets from the far
side of the Divide bite my skin. Graupel: 

You taught me that. Between snow and sleet.
It lays down fine crystals that sing.

You Can See It

She was saying a great blue heron hurtled into her study, lay wing-cloaked on the
plywood floor. Later, it sat up.

She was saying the elk were rearing her aborted daughter.

She was saying the mourning cloak moths spattered on her windshield foreshadowed her
death.

She was saying the passenger jets were driving the pumas insane.

In the end, she said, the Colorado watershed would be closed to humans, but one old
woman would sneak away,

and live there.