FALL/WINTER 2026
The Crazies
Lindsay Turner
1
A herd of horses steps out from the spruces
Into a valley of pink light.
It is too beautiful, as it were,
As it happened, as it did.
The mountains were named for a woman
Sent by her grief above the treeline,
As it happened, as it did.
Demise, in the afternoons,
When the horse trailers go down the valley,
Rises in dust off the roads.
The legend is as bad as history.
Then I ran down the mountain
Like a muddy dog going home late
To the mandate that means it will be such,
And it is.
2
The mandates that mean it will be such:
The weather forecast, the obituary, the legends
That are as bad as history.
All afternoon it was going to rain
But it did not rain.
All evening one small cloud hung weightless.
Something drew me up above the treeline.
On the way down, a leaning spruce
Aimed a dry and broken branch straight at my chest.
I thought about walking into it.
Healings and abductions happen far from here.
All the city’s nets are far away.
I heard a little thunder but it stayed away
But still there are things that go bump.
3
What is it I am working through here,
Hoping momentum will carry me up and over the ridge?
A craze: a passing fad.
To craze: the fragile surface breaks.
A cloud hangs weightless over the saddle between the peaks.
The afternoons, dust and demise,
The yellow flowers lose their petals.
The horses blow their breath out as they graze
And they move together in the evenings.
It is too beautiful as such and yet, for now, it is:
The legends are as bad as history,
The sandhill cranes fly over and are heavenly.
Relentlessly the days continue in the line of history.
Some knowledge, like the thunder, stays away.
Note: The Crazies are a mountain range in south-central Montana.
Excerpted from MIDDLE SLOPE: Poems by Lindsay Turner. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Copyright © 2026 by Lindsay Turner. All rights reserved.