Let Us Study Idaho
and Other Poems

"Every book that comes out under my name is a new problem. To begin with, every one brings with it an immense examination of conscience." – Merton, from "Looking in the Mirror of My Books"










March 12


Such a fine late spring walk two days ago along the trails at Trempeauleau Mountain. This patch of the world – quite vast, really for the midwest – is one the great representatives of the Mississippi watershed and used to be considered by our native americans as spiritual. I realize more and more, especially in this particular season – early spring, some melting of past snow, wet, mostly dreary here in the midwest – that the spiritual dose that comes from these little mini-getaways are the most critical things that we could possibly do for one another. I would make the explicit point that a walk along the very same trail we just were on is the new church, the new religion, and that we are very far away indeed from any true fount of understanding a god that does not meet us in the here and now. The trail was an open channel through leaf flushed woods; above, at all times, the rocky outcroppings of the sandstone ridges and pocketed here and there remnants of old oak savannahs that have not been entirely overtaken by invasives or encroachment. I see, again and again, that this is it, this is the thing that we have to hold onto, experience, if we are to either see ourselves or, as Buddhism would encourage, let ourselves and self-perceptions disappear, becoming the very thing that we are witnessing. We walked up to the top of a ridge. There were a series of metal prongs there that would be used as a wooden bench in a couple of months. We sat on them for five minutes. To our right the farm fields still in play all the way onto the horizon; straight ahead, Brady Bluff, one of the highest bluff peaks in the state; to our left, the broadly majestical River lined by rolling bluffs. What this world is, is enough. In only hours, I would begin to hammer away at a keyboard, place a variety of abstract pressures on myself, worry for futures, regret some past maneuvers. The sandstone said nothing. It's yellow trail leading up held our feet.