Peter Anderson

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Poet: Peter Anderson

Peter Anderson’s most recent books include Heading Home: Field Notes (Conundrum Press, 2017), a collection of flash prose and prose poems exploring rural life and the modern day eccentricities of the American West; Going Down Grand: Poems from the Canyon (Lithic Press, 2015), an anthology of Grand Canyon poems edited with Rick Kempa, which was nominated for a Colorado Book Award; and First Church of the Higher Elevations (Conundrum Press, 2015), a collection of essays on wildness, mountain places, and the life of the spirit. Peter taught writing at Adams State University for ten years. He lives in Crestone, Colorado.

Poems

Black Ice

This mountain lake lives in shadow. The sun is a rounder… stays away longer each night, lays low behind the ridge during the day. The winds come down off the mountain, sweeping skiffs of snow across the ice. A father pulls on his skates, so much easier now with plastic and Velcro than it once was with leather and lace. He tests the freeze, first around the edges—a few feet thick—then out in the middle—clear and so deep, he can’t tell where the ice leaves off and the black water begins. He skates as fast as he can, grateful this sprint is his own—no whistles, no coach. He slides one blade in front of the other, leans into a wide rink turn, and carves two thin white lines that follow him out to the edge of the lake where his daughter, still wobbly in her new pink skates, glides toward him. He takes her hands in his and skates backwards, looking over his shoulder for stones frozen in the ice, then back at his daughter who, steady now, sees only what lies ahead.

This prose poem appears in Heading Home: Field Notes (Bower House Books)

Leaving St. Elmo

One-room cabin in an abandoned false-front town, the Divide off to the west, mountains honeycombed with all the old diggings. One winter, the only resident, I read old newsprint, learned to see St. Elmo the way it once was—smelter smoke narrow-gauge high-grade dreams, before the paper dollar wrecked the gold and silver market and the railroad pulled out. My place, the only light for miles, threw its rays out toward the Milky Way. Woodstove, sleeping bag on the floor, cans of Del Monte Fruit, Campbell’s Soup, Maxwell House Coffee, mice snapping traps in the cup- board. Outside, night winds blew prospecting ghosts down the mountain. If the lower elevations called me now and then, it was only until the nightmares came: visions of après ski tights and fur jackets wandering the newly fern-barred streets of this ghost town turned resort, or worse, the old cabin surrounded by an invasion of doublewides, riding the wave of some meth-headed oil and gas boom. When the mine at Climax shut down, it was the bust that finally got to me—storefronts boarded up from Leadville to Salida, down-valley friends leaving the country, nights darker than the shafts inside the mountain above town. The two-lane that ran south by southwest over Poncha Pass and Wolf Creek slid down the switchbacks on the sunset side promising brighter lights . . . Durango, Durango . . . and possibility. So I folded up the map of home I’d made and it was adiós old shack, adiós old town, and hello to a road I couldn’t help but ride.

This prose poem appears in Heading Home: Field Notes (Bower House Books)

Querencia

Is the space where we are most at home. The sound of the word takes me to water,
to the river maybe, the nose of a kayak in the heart of a wave, as it spills over a ledge
curls back upstream, crests and falls again crests and falls again and holds the boat
in place, as long as I dip paddle and rudder, keeping to the sweet spot, where the up
and down currents meet, where there is stillness in motion, where I am held letting
the sun slivered water slide by on the glassy edge of a hole in the river. Dwell as water
on water, blood on blood, surf the heart of it all. You are here, says querencia…in this
body, on this river, you are here.

This prose poem appears in Heading Home: Field Notes (Bower House Books)

Where I Am

I could tell you to turn east onto the county road just south of Moffat.
I could give you a street address and a phone number. I could tell you
we are the last house on the left before you hit Crestone creek.
I might suggest that you look for the vultures circling in the end-of-day
sky just west of the Sangre de Cristos. Maybe I’ll be there.

But a part of me stays further south beyond the trailhead where
the Refuge begins. Check the creekbed that threads out into the
valley. Look for a western tanager perched on a cottonwood branch,
or a mountain bluebird that carries the sky across a hidden meadow,
where there is always a pool of dappled light, where it is so quiet
you can hear the dead sing.

Here the wind has scoured out the sand, except for a ridge
held in place by two old Ponderosas, down which a mothering elk
and her two calves descend at dusk for a drink from the creek.
Later, the stars ride by overhead—Cygnus, Delphinus, Aquila.
Even they are transient.

I listen for whatever it is that stays.

This prose poem appears in Heading Home: Field Notes (Bower House Books)

Deep Calls to Deep

End-of-day drive west of Gunnison, a perfect round sun behind the sky’s memory of wind and sand. See the truck, small as a toy out at peninsula’s end, and farther out, the man, only a dark speck at the far edge of lake-rim thaw. Has he heard how the ice broke up yesterday and stranded two fishermen from Denver? Does he listen now for the first hint of fracture, or is he lost in the depths where his silver spinner flickers past the big browns so lean and slow this time of year? Maybe it will draw them from their torpor, they will give chase, and he will feel again the pulse he cannot see, which passes as fast as his own, just enough to invite another cast, and another, into the last light … this man out fishing on the edge of the ice.

This prose poem appears in Heading Home: Field Notes (Bower House Books)

True News from a Small Town Beat

“Give me all the money in your cash register,” he said.

“Are you serious?” asked the night-shift clerk.

“Yes,” the old man said.

“Who do you think you are?”

“Well, I never done this before . . . how much you got in your register, anyway?”

“Not much,” she said.

“Could you give me twenty dollars?”

“No, I can’t.”

“Howbout five?”

“No.”

“Well, howbout a pack of smokes?”

“I’ll give you a couple,” she said.

“Bless you,” he said.

“He was desperate,” she would say later on.

Police are investigating.

This prose poem appears in Heading Home: Field Notes (Bower House Books)

Bats

You look down into the shaft of an abandoned iron mine, a dark mountain portal into a deep cavern. Your vision takes you only partway to the source of a slight breeze. Waiting for the bats is like dwelling in the borderlands between waking and sleeping. How long, how long? Then a deep stirring and the early thread of the dream appears. Only a few bats, thousands more will follow, riding this mountain tide into a world where you are a stranger. You know they listen to echoes that you can’t hear. You admire their pirouettes as they emerge. Here, in the foothill twilight, what matters is the way they rise into a vast, whirling column. What matters is the breeze and the sound, like moving water, they leave in their wake. What matters is this great river of wings that ends as it begins. In darkness. Now you know where the night comes from.

This prose poem appears in Heading Home: Field Notes (Bower House Books)

Fireflies

I learned a long time ago that your light wouldn’t last till morning. I know now that your scientific name is Lampyridae, that the organ on your abdomen secretes your light, that you flicker for mates, sometimes for prey, that some of you eat only pollens and nectars, that some of you follow slime trails left by slugs which you eat with your long, grooved mandibles, that you must avoid frogs who gorge on you till they glow, that sometimes, say in the Great Smoky Mountains or in the jungles of Malaysia, you gather in great swarms and flash your lights in sync.

We have satellites that sweep across the sky—in sync with a super clock in Boulder, accurate to a millionth of a second—which help us aim our missiles. And we have many earthbound lights … lit cigarettes trailing home from the bars at closing time, pickups throwing their high beams down dark county roads, the flicker of prairie towns seen from airplane windows.

We are here, they all say. And you’re on your own, the night says back.

This prose poem appears in Heading Home: Field Notes (Bower House Books)

Barbies in the Backcountry (South San Juans)

The first time I notice the Barbies we are a mile in from the trailhead. I see them strapped to my youngest daughter’s pack as if taken hostage. The Barbies could care less that the load we have carefully packed onto our four-legged porter, a burro named Sabina, is listing to the left and about to flop over. One of the Barbies looks at me, pouty, sassy—Oh, you’re, like, so incompetent—as I try to shift the load back into place.

When the Barbies make their next appearance, I am secretly happy they have been liberated from my daughter’s pack, stripped naked, and set afloat in a very cold mountain stream. The Barbies ride the current, their long, slinky legs goose-bumping off creek-bed cobbles and their carefully coiffed hair trailing like algae behind them. Get me … like … out of here.

How strange this must be for the Barbies … to be without their closets full of Barbie clothes, without their pink Corvettes and mini cell phones, hundreds of miles from the nearest mall, headed into a long night with a cold bivouac ahead of them. As if their creek immersion weren’t enough, they are now perched in a remnant snowbank near our high-altitude camp, legs akimbo in exotic yoga positions. Hellowwwwwww … we’re Barbies not G.I. Joes!

Poor Barbies. They are now huddled together in a large woolen mitten, having weathered the night dressed only in pink evening gowns. We didn’t … like … sign up for this. And yet they are smiling in the morning sun, as if maybe they are proud of their new survival skills.

I am glad that my daughters set the terms when the Barbies come to play, and not the other way around.

This prose poem appears in Heading Home: Field Notes (Bower House Books)

Riding the Tongue

I heard about it all on the way to the river. You had taken a pass on all the gadgets that might win you a few more days to breathe. In your own voiceless way, you told them to keep it real and take you home.

That night, while the summer meteors flashed across the Milky Way, I held you in a prayer, without purpose or destination per- haps, other than the moment it made. Clear. Your eyes. Deep like the trout-finning pools in the river below camp.

Next morning, I forgot about you. It was the light playing on the water. You know how it is. You paddle through it, mesmerized by the shimmer of it all, riding its shine like dragonflies delirious in their coupling flight.

We camped above the big rapid that night, the one we feared the most. I was listening to the crickets—those that drone and those that chant—when a screech owl flew out of its own silhouette and took its shadow downstream.

By then you were at home, maybe in a bed beside the window, looking out on the mountain whose thermals you knew well. Below our camp, the owl perched above that glassy slant of water at the top of the rapid—the tongue that always says “over here”—and the current that would glide us, come morning, beyond the ledge where the river disappears.

This prose poem appears in Heading Home: Field Notes (Bower House Books)