Palouse Hills, Near Pullman

Palouse Hills, Near Pullman by Jeffrey Gray Riding west on the bus from the dry land east of the mountains I knew I wouldn’t see you again for a year or more and out the window lay those hills two thousand years of silt blown down from the glaciers eroding pale buff but wintry I was seeing them for the first time and never would again never will with your death now so many years behind and no reason to go back to the cropped wheat or to your wish to be a meadow with that return cut off in your life’s own evening in those rooms in that town in that car and the death that you took— (though we say she took her life —) never leaves me not in the cells formed this morning nor those in the infant night where they foliate unsensed unseen. Poetry Home Art by Lilith Smith