Poems

The Mountain Will Swallow You

The mountain will swallow you, if you let it.

Start by lifting the pack to your bended knee,

put your right arm through the strap and swing it

up and around onto your back,

not sure you can actually carry the weight all the way.

With your left arm through the other strap

buckle the hip belt and the sternum strap,

and take a step, that first step of thousands of steps –

and start walking.

You just keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Once you get a rhythm and some momentum,

you think This isn’t as hard as I thought.

Then you start to notice things as you stride along

above the West Fork of the Santa Barbara:

ponderosa and fir and stands of aspen,

boulders the trail winds around,

the ridges looming above the canyon,

butterflies, ravens and a soaring hawk.

Still, you wonder if you’re up to it –

two days and twelve miles to the divide

with nearly a third of your weight on your back to start.

It’s just one step and then the next

in an almost pleasurable monotony

that becomes a succession

of seemingly endless next points reached,

getting yourself to the next spot,

then picking another one,

eating the trail one bite at a time.

Minute by minute, hour after hour,

until your soul seeps into the landscape like water

and your feet have grown roots.

Cut off from roads and traffic, from the sound of car engines,

unplugged from cellphones and schedules and calendars

you’re now touching the Earth

and you feel the rhythm of her pulse

as yours entrains with it, synchronized.

Finally you reach a meadow with a good campsite

seven miles up the canyon

just before the trail crosses the stream.

The massive ridges so high above the canyon

look down on you with indifference, not impressed

but without objection, tolerant and respecting.

The mountain has swallowed you –

you have become wilderness.

Country of Stone, Company of Stone

I fly on wings back to the still waiting

stone and sand and juniper and prickly pear,

to the canyon country

that knows a deeper hidden history

than the wink and blink of time in history books.

They don’t reach the bottom of the well

where the rock hold its secrets,

a silent history of Earth-making-and-unmaking,

mass extinctions and tectonic plate shifts.

Even the human tentacles of science

can only trace their broad outlines.

A hundred million years of secret rock-tales

are bound there in Wingate, Entrada, and Navajo sandstone

on the Colorado Plateau and surrounding mountains.

I might live eighty-odd years,

ninety if I’m lucky – or unlucky,

but the stone will endure.

When I go to the canyons

I feel something of the depth and weight

of what rock has weathered,

even if I can’t read the story.

I become the size I am, no more.

At the same time my spirit expands

beyond the bounds of mind and body,

and with that breadth I live larger than I am.

Listening with my feet I hear something

silent and vast, feeling its vibration

as I move over its endless rolling terrain.

I’m free and light as I feel my feet

tread the weight of ages that the stone holds,

indifferent to our human mucking-about on it.

So I go back over and over, year after year,

to renew the acquaintance of my few years

with stone that feels like eternity.

Grace

A ballet dancer, a sculpture titled Bird in Flight,

a gazelle gliding across an African plain.

Anything smooth and elegant,

often in motion or suggesting it,

we say is graceful – full of grace.

Grace is also something of the spirit,

not something that can be held and kept in a cage,

itself a spirit and a spark

that lights on me like a butterfly on my shoetop.

Like gentle rain on parched desert ground

it comes over me and I’m flowing with the current.

It washes the dust from my soul

and leaves me clean and shining

when the winds blow the clouds away.

Something warm and pure like sunlight

has entered my heart and soul and for a time I’m freed

from all that weighs me down and holds me back.

It stays only as long as it wants,

then having a mind of its own, leaves without a farewell,

and I return to life’s “business as usual.”

I chop wood and carry water, buy groceries,

wash the dishes, do the laundry.

Everything is like it was before,

full of routine and empty of grace.

I no longer regret that it flew away,

knowing it will visit again,

but elusive and not at my bidding,

not something I can capture and cage.

I can only savor and appreciate it

when it shows at my door and grants its favors.

But I can leave the door open

and welcome grace when it walks in.

On the Santa Barbara Divide

Standing on top of the Santa Barbara Divide,

the whole Pecos watershed

spreads a measureless green quilt below

reaching to the horizon.

Every tree is a thread

woven with uncountable others

into this dark, silent blanket.

Every acre, every square inch crawls with secret life,

each living thing hunting its food

and hiding from its hunters.

Up here on this Olympian ridge,

surveying the vastness from above 12,000 feet

and twelve miles from a road in any direction,

I feel like a god.

At the same time,

rock older than 100,000 lifetimes

contemplates my fifty-odd years with a yawn.

And I’m invisible in this wilderness

to any other eye that looks across it

to the ridge I so proudly straddle.

But I’m also a link in this chain

as I hand the past at my left

on to the future on my right,

no less than the coral polyp

that once became the tiniest grain

of the limestone I stumble on.

I’m part of that eternal march. I can feel it.

In a few days I’ll retrace my steps back to the trailhead

and to my place at the center of my life.

But for now I hang suspended in this proud immensity

happily being the center of nothing.