Left Hand Canyon

for Richard Hugo The Rev. Royal Filkin preaches tomorrow on why we are sad. Brethren, Montana’s a landscape requiring faith: the visible government arrives in trucks, if you live out far enough. If you live in town, the government’s gone, on errands, in trucks. Let citizens go to meetings, I’ll stay home. I hate a parade. By the time you get the trout up through the tiny triangular holes in the Coors cans, they’re so small you have to throw them back. Glum miles we go to Grandmother’s house. The earth out here doesn’t bear us up so much as it keeps us out, an old trick of the beautiful. Remember what Chief Left Hand said? Never mind. Everything else was taken from him, let’s leave his grief alone. My Eastern friends ask me how I like it in the West, or God’s country, as it’s sometimes called, though God, like a slumlord, lives in the suburbs: Heaven. And I don’t live “in the West”; I live in this canyon among a few other houses and abandoned mines, vaccinations that didn’t take.