Reflections West

"Sixty years old and riding my bike no-handed across the Higgins Street bridge into downtown Missoula, feeling my stomach churn with the anger and fear that has choked our civic air — but also the with the miracles of hot wind and flowing water," writes poet, novelist and teacher, David Allan Cates. "Despite my spread-arm victory pose, I carry a feeling of lost-ness—of emptiness that’s also a kind of balance—a wound, that’s also, somehow, a spring. I’ve written books that felt to me when I wrote them to be a matter of life or death—and now they sit placidly on shelves like pretty colored sea shells. My goal anymore is just to hold it all—to spread my arms like a Tour de France champion and feel the lightness and sadness that comes from the loss of parents, from three daughters moved far from home striving for courage in both common and heroic ways. I’ve got a garden in my backyard that’s full of weeds, a wife who treats me as though after all of these years she still loves me, and a