A Poem: The Gift

"Montana Moonrise" 30x40" oil on linen - by Clyde Aspevig, and the poem written inspired by it.

The Gift

You say the painting is a portrait of what made us:
The drives across the west, just the two of us,
bluffs above the rivers, sunsets on the mesas
crossing ravines of bedded stones
undulating beneath the grass.
Those vistas entered us, and have remained,
telling us that we are not their measure,
but are measured by them,
telling us that landscapes shape more than land,
that their water is our blood; their wind; our breath;
telling us we are only specks
swirled in the continuing existence
of boulders, clays, brush and trees,
and fence lines leading to towns, and dreamers in them,
where the rivers carve foundations,
flooded, dry, then flooded again,
oxbowing the dreamers’ endeavors.
If one sees this, what need of other gods?
For you have your protector,
and faith in what befalls you: good or bad.
You know your life does not end with you
but runs on and on through these shifting gravels.

 - Michael Molland