After the Cricket
Back east the New England landscapes
feel archaic, compressed
a friend’s recent letter speaks of Mt. Greylock
Was it Herman Melville gave it the name?
Mound of blue conifer looks in my memory smoky
I spent a week
camped at its base
Little waterproof tent
my wife Kristina, Oliver who I worked with for years,
our midsize shepherd dog muddy prints on the swamp-colored
Army Surplus sleeping bags
We sorted books
in a soft meadow all day
Someone near Pittsfield
had filled a barn with crazy old titles, lots on the
architecture of early cathedrals—now wanted
to sell ‘em.
200 cartons we packed & shipped West
to the collectivist bookshop
we worked at.
Finally in my 67th year
I’m figuring out that jagged, jumbled up
cracked granite snarl of the Indian Peaks
carved into pitching shapes during the last ice age.
the drainages are called Blue, Green,
Rainbow, Jasper,
and there’s blocky old Devil’s Thumb
elk going over the passes longer than all human history
hoof tracks mark the scary snow cornices
Chasms, chessmen, pinnacles, chutes
lurching spires we call hoodoos,
relict glaciers & ice-fed lakes
that clench your balls up into your belly
It’s Tao te Ching
and Farmer’s Almanac crunched by three
billion years into one granite treatise
a text no one could figure out
in one lifetime.
In the foothills crickets arrived overnight—
Julia Seko once told me
the elderly gardeners of Longmont
who work the unforgiving soil beneath Long’s Peak
say snow comes six weeks
after
the cricket.
