Grand Lake Sunrise

(August 2022. Written the morning after Sunset Grand Lake, from my campsite on Stillwater Pass, as I took a little break from my ceiling work in Kremmling. I know this area quite well. Though this poem is weaker than its pessimistic partner the night before, there is hope here.)

Have you ever woken early, against your body’s wishes,
Just to do something symbolic, meaningful only to you?

They say it is darkest before the dawn but I know this is false.
I woke to alarms before dawn, and already the world was lightening,
Already light blue brightening behind burned trees,
Already the edges of the mountains surrounding source
Emanating an early red upwards.

No, it is not darkest, but coldest before the dawn,
And the next Great Awakening belongs to those with the fortitude
To rise, put on a jacket you’ll soon remove,
And walk out into the cold waking air
To hike a mountain who’s name you don’t know
Thinking, for reasons you also don’t know.

I sat on a burned tree to catch the sun rise over the Front Range
To slowly bathe the west in thin blankets of light,
The brightness increasing in intensity before the sun even showed,
Fast enough for me to see the air saturate in light,
Humming with higher and higher frequency—
Something is coming to set the world alight.

With the sun rising finally over the horizon crest
The east becomes too blinding, and I turn my gaze west.
Silent and satisfied I climb the rest of the mountain,
Catching my breath and scrambling up scree after my puppy,
Knowing only upwards like warming air rising in the sun.

At the peak I break into vista—
All around, in every distance, mountains,
Closer, Grand Lake, the deepest natural lake in Colorado,
And Shadow Mountain Lake and Lake Granby, man-made
Because lakes are easier to control than rivers,
Although only rivers can bring you to destiny.
And closer, towns, Grand Lake and Granby, and beyond
That ridge I know hides Kremmling and Hot Sulphur.
And closer, rolling hills of green and brown,
Trees burned, trees still alive for now like unshaved stubble,
And closer, around me, the black corpses of burned trees,
And white corpses of burned trees still standing…

But closer still I look so you can see, that in the space
Once filled by by burned trees, now grow wildflowers wildly,
Dark purple and light purple, yellow and white, mad magenta—
Everywhere there was death is now thick with color,
Wildfires clearing space for wildflowers.

Maybe I was too negative last night considering
The possibilities for a burned out, dried up West.
Here at Stillwater Pass I can see the source of the
Great Western River, and still the water does pass.

The Ute called it Spirit Lake, the bowl of ancestral souls,
Collected to cool the lips of the living tribe.
The first eastern sunlight strikes the still water, stirring
The spirits as steam softly rising to greet the present.

The night evaporates—
The dead speak upwards,
And ancestral aspirations stretch
To fill the sky and I.