David Romtvedt

Day Of Rest

This July Sunday is hotter than any I have ever felt in Wyoming. It has been dry for weeks. The sun hangs limply in the sky, but for all its limpness, it blazes. The clouds are thin and high. The temperature is over a hundred.

My Winter Wood

Deep Blue Flower

Selected Poems

Selected Poems

Disappearances

My father died on a July day in Phoenix. When he was found, his temperature was 108. The medical examiner’s certificate listed the cause of death as hyperthermia.

Loyalties

I was to begin teaching in the creative writing program at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. I had just turned forty. It was my first university teaching position. I approached it with longing, excitement, and fear.

Selected Poems

Inventing Wyoming

Everything we take from the earth, every drop of rain and every blade of grass, every bit of flower and fruit, the sinew and muscle of the animals we kill, we borrow these things for a brief time and we will pay them back. The records are kept from the beginning of time.

A Wyoming Myth

In January of 1966 an old Crow woman, tired of her age and the palsied chattering of her body, walked from Powder River all the way up Crazy Woman Creek into the Bighorns. She thought she would be as the original Crazy Woman, another Indian dying alone in the snow.