Returning, now some years ago,  for a two week course for a job that once was the focus for much of my activities -- returning to a state that in early adulthood had meant so much to me -- I wrote this rather introspective piece after a weekend auto excursion into the Rockies.
 
             BACK IN COLORADO
Then he was back in Colorado
The once of his future.  Awake
Customarily early, freshscent and sealed
Hotel, television on for sound, he parted
The drapes--beheld the tilted, green
Suburban reaches, and above and beyond,
Beheld, beheld again dawn come upon
The mountains, the Rockies--dawn again. 
He dressed.  He drove; he drove off
Into or after the highland spring--
  Where or when once all was vibrant
And new and haunchflesh filled the first
Levi's of his already fading youth--
The uniform, the look, that look,
That uniform of his... He never fit in. 
Even then he knew or didn't know 
He could never fit, could never
Let himself fit in.  He passed.
He passed it seemed easily or
Easily enough or so it seemed
He passed for one of them,
But he never let them know (him)--
Even those who tried or thought to
Know were never permitted near;
It was control perhaps or fear
Or fear of control or
Of himself or something
We--he never really knew.
He dressed and drove up and west, the
Snowmelting valley streams roiling,
Swollen with spring, red rock roadside
Dropped fresh by the recent heavy rain,
Roadway curves and grades easily grasped,
A route bending sometimes back toward the
Brilliant sunshine, he drove, he drove--
Mountain gaping and vibrant again,
Briefly there again--
  What, what then?  He claimed to
Like those mountains, though, then,
Their noises, imagined silences.  He
Wrote or wrote at their clouding over
And twitching aspen and descending
Snowlines--of seasonal interstices
He wrote, in his uniform, the pride
Of new blue jeans, his new stab
At life, gently deluded, lulled by
The newing of perception, imagery of  
Accessed ridgelines, treelines, the Rockies-- 
Accessed and at hand--willing to put forth
What passed for effort, an effort to fit
(But never was) in somewhere, out there--
To pass, pass for something,
To stand for something--waiting,
Deluded or deluding, waiting
For a power, perhaps, or waiting
To catch on somehow, then, somewhere
Near here now long, long ago...
Briefly again--we wonder, he wondered
Almost aloud along the indistinct snowline
High above springtime again,
All or nothing the same again--
Wondered how he could or could not
Look beyond the glint and constraint
Of the immediate, brilliant, and quickly
Clouding sky or why he could not or never
Look toward a farther anywhere or without
Indifference or terror or ahead he drove he drove.
 
 
    Aurora, Colorado and
Bothell, Washington
May/June 1995
 

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