Surveyor's Wagon in the Rockies, by Kenneth Chamlee

Surveyor’s Wagon in the Rockies, by Albert Bierstadt (USA) 1859.

Surveyor's Wagon in the Rockies

The lone figure fifty yards beyond wagon and resting team
cocks arm to hat to shade his disbelief. How can those mountains, 
blue and humped as plowed earth, grow taller every day but not closer?
 
No tripod or transit set, horizon unmarked by boulder, 
tree or water’s glint. How do you measure a measureless land, 
a land empty of everything but wind and grit?
 
Of five mules and a saddle horse, not one drops its head to graze.

Kenneth Chamlee

Kenneth Chamlee is Emeritus Professor of English at Brevard College in North Carolina.  His poems have appeared in The North Carolina Literary Review, Cold Mountain Review, Ekphrasis, and many others.  He won  ByLine Magazine's National Poetry Chapbook Competition (Absolute Faith, 1999), and the Longleaf Press Poetry Chapbook Competition (Logic of the Lost, 2001).  His poems have appeared in six editions of Kakalak: An Anthology of Carolina Poets. He is currently working on a poetic biography of painter Albert Bierstadt. Learn more at www.kennethchamlee.com.