Jane McPhetres-Johnson
Growing up beside the continental divide
we lived on the eastern slope where the great slabs
of red stone tumbled down steep inclinations
above our heads and buried their sharp points
in the sandy soil where wild flower children followed
in the foothilly steps of Chief Left Hand’s canyons
barely aware of the other side’s western faces
except when we skied the highest mountain peaks
and got lured down “advanced-only” trails in error
or dare, ending somewhere over there where
great white mogul-ridden slopes tipped us over
and dumped us into summer fields of cantaloupes.
Who were these people anyway, staking out claims
to long straight rows of gain in their shiny tractor
cabs full of stereo talk-radio heads and cool A/C and
who were their followers, shadowy rows of fold-up
folks strung out behind, hands full of melons, eyes
peeled for another sort of slippery slope called ICE
and who are we in this country of pointless furs and
filtered glasses, one foot in salt of the earth-melting
fat cats’ oil and gas pipes fracking our own mother’s
bedrock and broken waters so we can keep the other
foot on the up slope, keep on truckin’ and flying free
sky high over the not-so-ancient great wall of Mexico?
Dying out incontinentally divided now, hanged, drawn
and quartered into states of red and purple and black
and blue, so bruised and beaten down and swollen up
we’ve lost our heads and now we’ve got a head that’s
lost his way, a bipolar chief for two polarized slopes
tottering, divided, forgetting how to lean on each other.
Jane McPhetres-Johnson holds an MFA from Goddard College where she studied with Thomas Lux and Stephen Dobyns. Working for the NEH via the New England Foundation in the 1980s and 90s, she created and coordinated literature and history programs in public libraries throughout the region. During that time she edited two readers, Consider the Source: Old Tales (New Eng. Foundation for the Humanities, 1989) and Encompassing Columbus: Five Italian Lives (New Eng. Foundation for the Humanities, 1992), both designed to facilitate discussions in library programs. She recently moved to Amherst, Massachusetts, where she takes daily walks on the Robert Frost trail accompanied by the ghost of Emily Dickinson.
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