"Report from the West" by Tom Hennen

"Tetons from Signal Mountain" by Ansel Adams, 1930's

Snow is falling west of here. The mountains have more than a

foot of it. I see the early morning sky dark as night. I won't lis-

ten to the weather report. I'll let the question of snow hang.

Answers only dull the senses. Even answers that are right often

make what they explain uninteresting. In nature the answers

are always changing. Rain to snow, for instance. Nature can

let the mysterious things alone—wet leaves plastered to tree

trunks, the intricate design of fish guts. The way we don't fall

off the earth at night when we look up at the North Star. The

way we know this may not always be so. The way our dizziness

makes us grab the long grass, hanging by our fingertips on the

edge of infinity.

"Report from the West" by Tom Hennen, from Darkness Sticks to Everything. © Copper Canyon Press, 2013.