friend down the slope near Gunnison with a ski-tip through
his skull, already dead New nursing major at an ag school Later,
a twelve-year-old from Texas, jean-clad, crashed into the trees
in front of me, thirteen He didn’t pass till chili mac
and the silence and noise of mittens piled over mittens After
I left town, Uncle warned I’d come back mountainside
from the coast a mail-order cowboy I’ve been offish and he’s been
offish, but it’d be nice to circle toward home, to learn bronc breaking
in the Stetson Grandpa died with His black box
of poker chips in the closet, I could bet on us all Red white blue white
green The year my friend portaged high schoolers all over
Oregon, she was twenty Had to heli out a girl whose epilepsy
medication got wet, even in a dry bag We called them
participants I called the French girl, twenty, who tried
to hide mango lotion for the backcountry in a bivy sack
participant to separate her from me, twenty From the QuickClot
and gauze I packed and the way I taped the skin flaps
on her blisters to her moleskinned feet No one likes to hear
Do what you’re told on the backside of a crag they paid
good money for I lost a San Jose girl in a snowstorm in Utah
for almost four hours When I got her back to camp, she
stutter-shrieked nonsense while I stripped her and yelled at her
and rubbed her whole body and checked her fingers and toes,
fingers and toes, into the night My friend and I talk risk,
the ways we might’ve died, or someone else might’ve
died The times we all, guides, took our four-wheel drives
out to the coordinates tattooed on everyone’s ass to black out
on the dunes A boys’ world out here Where you drink
down citrus Smirnoff when you find it hidden
in your zero-degree bag by someone heavier than you
are Where I’m first told my application was labeled hot one,
and that’s why I get to guide The game where, after the Fireball’s
gone and everybody’s been iced, we take off in the dark in every
direction The waking up as solo bodies in sand, half miles between
each My friend shakes her head over eighteen-year-olds she led
across flooded streams, waist-high Mud-bogged bottoms resisted
the tread of boots We hung bear bags at night from ropes
that never got dry Browned, burned on each end We said
yes Unclipped We threaded packs over torrent I was making beans
when the San Jose girl’d said I’m gonna go I heard her I thought
A joke A blizzard playing the pines like empty bottles, the dark
of desert March dark From the video of my wilderness first
responder exam, the one place I got points docked was where I yelled
in my friend’s hypothermic face, makeup-bloodied, You’re not gonna die,
while ice rain slicked numb skin slippery Never promise
anything, girl The year Mom set me on a candle
and my dress caught fire, it was Uncle who threw me down in the
snow A lesson in decisiveness That last year,
I was at the other end of the radio the trip a participant stumbled
from a summit Called in rangers Waited to call parents The oars
of Uncle’s canoe, hand-lathed, scoop water better
than fiberglass, he says There were guides who decided drunk
to take Cactus to the Clouds the night before Drove
through Los Angeles dusk to crash, dicks waving, in the Sonoran Desert
before climbing over 10,000 feet to San Jacinto Peak Uncle’s ankle
might not break in the same places mine does when stepped on
by a horse back home But purple is purple Maybe is as big as maybe