Yellowstone, WY by Emily Lawson

Now I hardly remember the hospital room

Yellowstone, WY

by Emily Lawson

It was during one of the long exhausted silences in the cancer ward—between drugged naps, between doctor rotations, my bad prognosis having been made carefully but terribly plain—that I began my theory. It was all about life’s density, not length, I said, addressing your outraged tears. I saw a beaver swimming under the dory on the Green River, then looked up to see a bald eagle snatch a fish. We floated through a canyon of ancient Vishnu Shist, dark and shiny as obsidian. We took turns as you sat at the foot of my bed: we drove through that apocalyptic storm in canyon country, purple lightning blasting sideways through green-glowing thunderheads—rain on one side, clear sunset on the other, throwing hot dusty arms through the windows on the highway to catch the giant raindrops. You saw a tornado of fire jump a valley. I saw a herd of wild horses running across the Mojave. We swam naked, alone as Adam and Eve, in Havasu Falls. Now I hardly remember the hospital room, thin and disposable as a sheet of blue lined paper. I think you held my burning feet to your chest. I forgot to say I saw a pack of wolves in the Yellowstone backcountry with my brother, just after sunrise, making coffee on the camp stove. The wolves seemed enormous. Seven or eight or eight of them regarded us. When you’re that vulnerable, fear is senseless. I stood looking into the dark one’s eyes. We kept looking. In time the black wolf broke my gaze, and in unison, without a sound, the pack turned down the path and loped away, behind a hill, and left us blinking in the light.

Read our interview with Poet of the Week, Emily Lawson, wherein she discusses the wilderness as both place of threat and escape, the metaphysics of survival, and the mind-body connection. About this, she says:

“I think I’m often disconnected from what my body knows. I often feel like a floating head. I’m constantly bumping into things because I’m off in the clouds. A stereotypical poet and philosopher in that way… One of the central ideas of enactive and embodied approaches to philosophy of mind and cognitive science is that the mind isn’t hermetically enclosed in the skull: it exists in the dynamic relationship between the embodied nervous system and the world.”