Two days twelve thousand years ago
or more, the giant lobe of ice that had dammed
the Clark Fork and backfilled a glacial lake
in five Montana valleys nine hundred feet
of water high unlocked—some say was floated,
undone where it had sutured to the rock—
or anyway at whatever fatal compromise was
burst, and on that side, Idaho, the gush
was so great that winds ahead of the sixty mile
an hour flood whipped the loess loose
from earth and drove it into dunes south
along the western front to the Snake and pounding
scraped Spokane and Sprague and, west, Washtucna
to bedrock and redrew the gorge through to
the Pacific. I’ve lived on that side of things.
The Trump and Covid epoch inundated
the editorial pages and real estate of
the college town until Ammon actual Bundy
came with a posse to avenge the honor
of anti-maskers singing hymns in Friendship
Square dispersed at first by blares above of
Wet Ass Pussy my own queer students
played at volume and then by police enforcing
the ordinance against gathering in numbers
when the virus was deadliest. The landscape has
changed so, nightly programs on hotel cable
slake a thirst to peer into the Moscow
homicides since, into the cargo van
militia men readied their riot in,
parked at the perimeter of Pride
last summer more or less where the first
of the flood came crashing.
On this side,
the energy was suction. Once the plug was out
everything was hydraulics, last and most
of all the sea that had to pour uphill,
over the notches at Markle and Wills, which
I climbed today to look over into the Camas
basin that slurped so hard the largest ripples
of earth on earth were risen and kettle pools
were plucked by downward spouts. By one, ice yet
at equinox, I photographed some tracks
that must be grizzly, enormous paws at amble
pace away from a spring in snowcake
warm enough the claw marks are dull,
and by another all the fur and none of the bones
of an elk I think, which might have been hauled
by a truck that didn’t hit but found it.
Nearby, the egg-sized bean scat led me,
crawling, under the barb into a meadow where
older kill was carcass white except
for pretty black hooves and fetlock hide.
I held a block of basalt unrounded and lined
by layers of seasons in the Pleistocene
until some sixty years of buildup—like, say,
from Civil Rights to now, beneath which
my whole life has been settled material—
pressured the divide until it gave and bottom current
made ripple trains across the prairie I
came to overlook yesterday and today.