Storm King Mountain
Chewing on a stalk of jimson weed,
looking down from Storm King Mountain
where the river flowed its columns of autumn colors,
Pete and I would toss small bits of granite like paperweights
out over the trees and listen to see if we could hear them coming back.
Once in awhile we did hear a distant clink
like the meshings of a gear coming into place;
a squirrel’s bright eye would leap from our fingers,
a barge of rusting iron would swirl about and pause on the river below.
It would be a dingy red square upon a blue ribbon
far removed from the sun igniting our valley.
Something dark is coming this way, he said.
I nodded, but what is a man to do.
There was a military academy below us.
There was Vietnam. There were heart attacks.
There were clocks with metal tongues counting our days.
There were gray faced women with gay lit bows
wrought in foreign shops by lives long locked away.
And the sun was beating down upon us,
so that we shed our shirts and began to burn;
Would it be so bad, we thought,
if something dark were coming this way,
when we could see it all so very well.
We have the time to plan;
we have a vista spread about us.
We can feel the roots of the earth taking hold.
We looked to the sunsets and waves of grain to our west;
even there along the marsh drawn margins of the river
where mallards and mergansers nest and long legged egrets
stretch between two cosmologies to pull coins from the waters
while wild rice rises into evenings catching fire along its flaring tips.
Deer fill the dreams of our suburban alleyways,
always moving, shifting shadows at the edge of sight,
and wild maidens clasp them to their hearts, run bare-legged
into thickets of desire we cannot understand but will come to cope with.
Why would it be hard with all these flames of life
swaying with the waves of autumn and a rising sun:
If something dark were to come this way, it would be filled with light.
In time, a shirt turns into a thousand pounds of metal at 80 miles per hour.
It turns into thirty tons of metal at 100 miles per hour.
It turns into a factory of crushed stone where life sweats into the cellar seeps.
It turns into a lair built of fallen trees, wrought iron, and electric needles.
It becomes a game of rock-paper-scissors
where somehow the paper shears off mountainsides and cuts metal.
Shadows come crashing through our windowpanes
to take small pills at night from bedside tables;
and, yes, an older man needs to sleep sometimes while the world keeps up.
And, yes, I can sleep, and can still keep it up as well as any man:
Even when something dark is coming toward us I am eager to pump light into it.
There is nothing gentle in a big black box barreling down a concrete river,
though its heart and soul and every shadow within its bulk is filled
with grains of the earth that could feed an endless multitude.
Not with the sun’s rays igniting all it touches at 100 miles per hour
contained within the dark.
--Jared Smith, from Lake Michigan and Other Poems, 2005
