Timothy Pilgrim
High on Adventure's Poet Laureate
Timothy Pilgrim

NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2024,
OUR 28TH YEAR

 
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ADVENTURE POETRY
By Timothy Pilgrim
 
   
 

Pray, Montana

Fight river rage, ancient flow away
from geysers, bison, grizzlies, the whole park. I’m trying to heal a life, the bit
that’s left. Pray — post office, one cafe, ranchers lined on stools, gun-racked trucks growling out back. Skirt town, give wide berth,

cross myself, re-cross a freshet, wander
both sides. Rethink Brautigan, his demise. Ponder an eddy — murky swirl, circled churn sucked under to return. Greet sunset,
Absaroka peaks bled out red. Dissect dusk,
failures, loss, lies, hope I survive

the coming night. It might absolve,
give shards of peace, even sleep. If there’s dawn,
if only clouds hang on the horizon,
like a wolf gripped tight by trap’s teeth,
I’ll chew off the leg, limp upriver,
sort of free.

 

 

 

 

 

Mime at night on Crete
Mime at night on Crete

 
     
     
 
 
  Timothy Pilgrim, a native of Montana and retired university journalism professor living in Bellingham, WA, is a Pacific Northwest poet and 2018 Pushcart Prize nominee. His poems have been accepted more than 500 times by journals such as Toasted Cheese, Mad Swirl, Cirque, Santa Ana River Review, Windsor Review, Hobart, Otoliths and Prole Press in the U.S. Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. He is the author of Mapping water and Seduced by metaphor: Timothy Pilgrim collected published poems, which the back cover calls “a 10 on any Richter imagination scale.”