Before leaving Brooks Camp

I wrote this:

7/16/2011

I brush my hair here, in the place of my dreams.
I pull the strands from the brush and
let the gentle wind take them.
I wish to leave a part of myself here
for the birds to use or to
slowly melt into the soil.
I leave a part of my heart here
and already long to return.

Why do I love this so much?
What is it that has lassooed
so tightly around my heart?

It must be the bears lumbering
along the pumice filled beach
at the edge of  Naknek Lake,
or the immature bald eagle soaring
overhead eyeing the river for signs of salmon.
Maybe it is the piercing repetative song of the golden crowned sparrow,
or the deadly monkshood, winking at me
with her deadly beauty.
It could be the porcupine, drinking so innocently from the lake in the evening,
or the vast Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes,
whose volcanic ash paints a landscape
so mysteriously powerful,
so raw in its cataclysmic transformative ability,
so beautifully pinkish and rust and striated,
 with a tuft of mountain harebell here,
and a spiral shaped alder there.
It beckons me to come in further,
walk inside her inner boundaries to Novarupta,
and the Baked Mountain Cabin,
and Mageik Lakes.
the Katmai Caldera,
and sandy, pumice-filled-desert-like landscape
surrounded by 14 active glaciated volcanoes,
some steaming, all majestic and volatile.
It is painful to leave this place.

I want to stay.