Fog lifts slowly from a quiet marsh.
A white shape drifts through it.
A trumpeter swan folds her neck and settles over a nest built of reeds and mud.
Her mate keeps watch a short distance away.
Swans often choose the same wetland year after year.
Pairs can stay together for life.
When spring opens the water, they return 
sometimes to the same stretch of shoreline.
Long before highways reached these valleys,
their wings cut this same air.

Long before names were given to these peaks,
their calls carried across thawing ponds. The marsh freezes.
The marsh opens again.
They come back.
That low, resonant note rolling over water at dawn
has sounded here through drought and flood,
through empty centuries and crowded ones.

Spend enough seasons in the Rockies,
and you begin to understand that is has a way of calling you back home.
​