Route Sketched on a Map, as if Walking
were a kind of drawing, large-scale,
repeatable. Yet, like the body, a walk
exists only as it happens. Look back,
if you can, and call the telling
a literature of paradise: the long days,
the short nights, wrapped up in an army poncho,
rolled in under the willow-brush to sleep, while
‘at every moment some new ridge
seemed to start into existence.’ Now
double the silence by listening to it:
some old tide-race nothing now
but a seep with yellow warblers. From there,
you may darken the way with a pencil,
steepen the avalanche path in accord
with leg muscles that hurt for days—
the near retaining evidence
of far. You may say, if you wish,
it was ‘quite monotonous all the way up,
composed of a winding tendril’—
though not if you copy accurately
those seventeen spruce cut off
at the depth of snow, their scattered trunks
awash in a lake of flowers: the scene
of force in all its glory. Nothing else known
if it cannot be measured in strides—
and no two equal. That is why
you must ‘tenderly unite the darker tints,’
devote the day to surviving the mountain
(that’s meant to say surveying, sorry)—
a mingling of topography and math,
or footsteps with quotations. Genre may be
a pleasant ramble or ‘stumbling, groaning,
slipping and pulling up short, over stones,
puddles, snow-wet grass, and every variety of pitfall
including cows.’ So tell me again
about the fall through ice, and I’ll tell you
of my boots on the trail, a well-drawn fact
despite the ‘solitude of frozen peaks.’
For after paradise comes the body,
with ‘all its goddamn ups and downs—’
its night frost has hardened the snow, or
soak a kitchen towel in a bowl of tea,
lay it over a sunburned back. Take in
the undulating near, the far level,
blue and cold, with ‘terraces of pure velvet’
(otherwise known as evening shadows),
clouds on the move (‘like weeds
in a river current’), and a dozen moraines
thrown about in a kind of frenzy.
I remember it all, the view was splendid,
and I’ve marked the spot where,
‘struggling to remember
where she put her foot on the way up,’
the dog crawled into my rucksack to sleep.
From The Avalanche Path in Summer, first published by Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry & Ecopoetics.
