“The types and symbols of Eternity, / Of first and last, and midst, and without end,” or, Rocky Mountain High
by Ernie on 04/08/10 at 10:36 am
In addition to giving a reading and delivering a critical paper out in Colorado, I found time to get out into some back country (though it would be more honest to say I was gently hauled out into it). The first day I climbed with poets Charles Doersch and David Yezzi up to the Arapaho Glacier, one of the southernmost glaciers in the United States. Cold rain bucketed down on us just at the timber line and continued for some way up, mixing in a few barrages of hail for good measure. My feet burned only just a bit more than my lungs at that altitude (I was breaking in new boots and well-used lungs), but I slowly hauled my way up, up, step by step, several hours to the top, where we opened a perfectly serviceable little wine. I admit that the glacier’s high edge filled me with a slow and deep terror, though that gradually grew to a numb seep of wonder. Photographs do little justice to the grandeur of the place, but here are a few nonetheless.
After three hours we arrive at the edge of the glacier, where I quaff some vino. Charles, a much braver soul, poses directly on the precipitous edge.
Cold sublimity . . .
In time I gained in confidence. The wine helped.
Three days later, lighting out from Crested Butte and the Hell’s Angels gathering, we hiked through fields of wild-flowers up to a pass.
Here is the crew of alpine poets, from left to right, Matt, Chris, me, Charles, and David (David Yezzi, taking the photograph, was also along for the hike).
I really should be wearing some Tyrolean gear, but instead I’m wearing my LineBreak t-shirt that scans in iambic trimeter “Would you like fries with that?”
Here I am, battered but not diminished, as lightning rolls in from the Maroon Bells.
“La cacciata” by Charles Doersch
I don’t remember Garda in that summer,
The color of the lake, what sky there was.
I’ve seen the slide of Mother with sunglasses
Inside a crater we scooped from the sand
To hide ourselves from the mountain wind.
And my father gone, this time to Venice.
A snail on an apple leaf I can recall,
And a German boy I later hit with a hammer.
I’m told it was lovely that June among the grasses—
That, evenings, we heard strands of music fall
Spattering across the lake from the far shore.
One day I sat with my toddler sister
Sucking blue-striped figs on the dock’s landing,
Toes angling close to the skin of the water.
A black snake unspooled from the reeds;
His gleaming muscle doodled dreamily
Toward us, sunlight trailing off in feathers.
We raised our heels and let him pass beneath,
Watching him thrust along, unzipping the water.
Mother caught us (was she out of breath?)
Snakes are bad, she shook us with a kiss.
A black one’s bite will kill you.
Off the dock she drove us as at a trot
Up to the open gate, and locked us out.
Originally in the New Criterion, June 2010
