The Sky Is My Garden, Part II

The sky is my garden, growing first light and last,

growing gods and beasts point by point at night.

Brought me sweetwater rain, this sky,

knit trees into mountains and prairie grass across the American West.

A man is free that drives a long road vanishing into chevron mountains

or rises as a fine thread into itinerant clouds.

I need antelope at scurry over open plains,

creeks both seen and heard, a sky that is blue, absolute.

Give me room to run.

I remember what Richard Hugo said

while studying a map of the Isle of Skye:

“We’ll be confined and free.  The roads end fast.”

 And Edwin Markham:

“The color of the ground was in him, the red earth:

The smack and tang of elemental things.”

Give me a road across the red earth that is without end.

Let me touch the very sky that delivered both river and trout.

--Mitchell Hegman