Estes is a Rotating Thing: a Desire... a River... and a Moment Before a Fire

Desire Will Take Me Over A Mountain: Whatever you can give

In the high desert I swam rivers of brine, sand, and sheen; the burn was unforgiving and blinding; the path of uprooted stones that cracked bones and scraped flesh led me recklessly between stabbing, dry thorns of Time.

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One thought settled beyond where the sun goes to set

One thought to renew at dawn a tempest to catch;

I long for you -- a taste of you, but whatever you can give, Man; 

I’d take.

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Above the timberline I failed a hundred times, to move; instead, I sublimed to the vacuum of primigenial you; my breath the permafrost I must cross to fall, to tumble over the other side at breakneck speed.

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Failing to grasp what’s obvious to me

these events of our past on this rotating thing;

I wish for clarity -- a reasoned transaction with you; yet, whatever you may give, Man; 

I’d take.

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I carried some hope and sure; I'd admit it's unsteady in my head

either you hand me some rope to settle this thought; or laid it down in your bed;

When I reach for your hand  -- or fall into your scorn; whatever you might give, Man; 

I’d take.

RS Wireman

Big Thompson

Big Thompson 

Spirits stumble and slip 

A river of hurt 

in ‘76

RS Wireman

The Gift is to Know a Moment When Living in the Moment: Just Before the Firestorm

Just before the firestorm came -- and you can smell it and sense it’s nearing -- the highland still died and still lived as it had always done before my primate foot had settled on the ancient and new clays in the moraine. Yet, the talent of the hominid is not only to mark, deliberate and judge a moment, but to reserve it and all the philosophical axons to physical memory for reflection-- to stimulate the moment again... and whether it hurts them in the long run or renews the spirit daily. A moment captured before a big fire could touch a valley some weeks later is an attempt to contextualize reality from sky to stone to smoke to bone to shoe prints on a worn, rocky, and rooted elk-horse-homo sapiens sapiens trail.

The moment moves like the elk and bends like the grass and, yes; flows away from the river and against the wind like the entirety of an afternoon on Earth. And it makes sense to those that can be made aware. Though the human memory will generalize it or fade it across time the quantifications and the intensity of a moment and its colors, the brain of a man will have successfully metamorphosed its data into raw emotions of knowing: knowing, knowing, knowing what beauty, significance, and the pending end of that moment -- and all these things at once: the burnt smoke remnants of life that hovered above us and then some miles away made brown the dusk of nurturing light that feed the green at our knees as it leaves us behind our multi-dimensional mountainscape.

RS Wireman

The Lakes

Forever the chilled dew of sunrise and dry smoldering sunfall 
stretched us and quantified us in increments of altitude as we
hiked, rested, drank, listened, smelled, exhaled, observed 
while we climbed ever so carefully with each step carried along with
the flow of time to bring us, give us, measure us, as we tie ourselves to a day. 

We had so much to do and did so much
in just ten hours in the mountains: Bear Lake, Dream Lake, Haiyaha Lake; and more
where time is expended as the Universe prefers: as if an illusion, but as real as it could ever be; 

and the next day took an entire dimension to arrive 
as the flow of these precious moments is forever the chilled dew of sunrise… the dry smoldering sunfall... the desire to do it all over again if blessed with the breath.

RS Wireman