flâneur

This Be the Place: Door in the Mountain | The Poetry Foundation

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Crouching, touching it with my fingertips, a sizzle of electric cold raced through my nervous system. It was, I realized, deadalive. Art by Matt Chase. This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place. The winter of 2022-2023 was huge in Colorado’s Elk Mountains. Over the course of seven months, more than 300 inches of snow fell in Crested Butte, where I reside. Drifts reached to the sky, pulled down powder, reached higher. “Will it ever stop?” At the supermarket and the gas station, the cafe and the tavern, that question eventually replaced “Hello.” When spring arrived in June and the white valley floor began showing patches of brown, then green, I kept one eye peeled for flowers and one eye trained on the wilderness west of town, a chain of backcountry peaks buried the previous November. In particular, a corniced ridge on 13,535-foot Treasure Mountain—a hulking massif about 10 miles off—drew my gaze. Fat chance that

This Be the Place is a series of short essays in which poets explore the mysteries and meaning of a particular place. The winter of 2022-2023 was huge in Colorado’s Elk Mountains. Over the course of seven months, more than 300 inches of snow fell in Crested Butte, where I reside. Drifts reached to the sky, pulled down powder, reached higher. “Will it ever stop?” At the supermarket and the gas station, the cafe and the tavern, that question eventually replaced “Hello.” When spring arrived in June and the white valley floor began showing patches of brown, then green, I kept one eye peeled for fl

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