This place. These weeks. These mountains. These new friends and colleagues. This respite from the pandemic. This room I’ve so fully occupied, replete with the books, pads and notebooks I brought with me, now all (mostly) read and reread, new poems tacked up on the cork strips near my desk, old and new poems mixed on the floor behind me, struggling towards a possible next collection—all now to become part of the past, another challenge to let go and move on to the next place.

The wind is wild outside, though it was a quite perfect day, warm and breezy, the cottonwoods starting to turn yellow, the formerly muddy paths now dusty and easily navigable. I’m at the Ucross Foundation, a writing residency in Wyoming, back after a year and a half when we all had to leave due to this mysterious Covid thing that was just beginning to make a name for itself. My fellow residents and I, gloved and masked to the hilt, braved the airports and the long journeys home—we had to, as Ucross, along with everything else, had closed down.