Some Doubt About Yellowstone

On our move eastward, Seamus and I stopped in several of the country's most beautiful national parks, some of which elicited some surprisingly skeptical poems like this one.

They tell us
it's natural
though we killed
the wolves to replenish them.

The geysers are controlled
by the wizard of oz,
sulfur yellow the imaginings
of that man
behind the curtain,
or the raw work of a man
in the crust of the earth,
he is injecting
blue food coloring
for the droves of RV drivers,
and the plump house wives in
pre-faded Yellowstone sweaters,
and the creaky bones of the awe-less,
whose hats are blown
onto the rust-mats
surrounding the unbelievable cauldron: the grand prismatic spring.

But mountains tell a true story;
their upper halves lifeless,
dusted with sugary snow,
their foothills unmolested even
by trails.

Trails are the way we know nature,
a solid human pattern in
unknowable greatness:
boulder rocks, marmots,
glacial creeks,
downed trees covered by nothing
but the silver
they've been given
for their absence of bark.

The grand prismatic spring, Yellowstone National Park.

from wikipedia