From Blue Hill Mountain
“Without recourse to oxygen,” I replied
to the new elite who’d just congratulated me
for “finally making it” to a bare granite
summit. Snark for snark, as snot now is said.
To suck the smazy vista into his tablet,
he saluted the sky as if gesticulating
to a Great Spirit in mute beseechment.
He’d strode up past me halfway up
the zig-zag trail, where I’d paused to peer
at a red eft curled in stiff half-ellipse
atop beech leaf detritus, as if dropped
helpless from on high it could only lie
existentially nirvanic or stultified
in polymorphic stasis upon a world
that would change it when it would,
and leaning down in mid-pace he’d waved
his phone across the eft to add it
to a cloud where eternal forms reside.
My dull village lay hidden behind this hill
made famous when a famous poet
of the old blue-blood elite called
it “foxstained” in a famous poem
to color the season’s colors as ill
as his own drunk mind. They’re long gone
now, those blood-wearied Brahmins
who bemoaned their age, their cottages
torn down for boxes built of glass.
My drab vinyl house sat in woods between
that green canopied Tilbury-Town
twinkling its bay far below us
and a crude strip-mall city far beyond
where despondency and madness
stalk the sidewalks of the four-lane
main street, babbling against truck exhaust
and traffic dust. I wrote sober verses
in lonely woods about the woods
I might as well have tacked to trees
but for a hesitancy to make litter.
Since but two of us stood alone
against the sky, I felt an old vestigial urge
to converse one with another,
to ask if after he’d surged past me, ski poles
churning like pistons of dynamic hygiene,
he’d seen the pileated woodpecker
playing hide and seek with a red-tailed hawk
amid an aspen thicket. But though we stood
together, we stood apart. For I stood
solitary, letting the long sigh of the world
dry my sweat and thrill my hair
while he thumbed a world turned to scenery
off to other worlds kept in thin boxes
not here, or there, or anywhere. Nowhere
to go but down, I turned then to go there,
lonely, yet content that up and down
are one, to let sounds and lights
go through me in flowing pictures,
to let the stillness of the eft,
the zeal of the hawk, and the woodpecker’s
cunning make a lesson of patience
in my mind alone, then in a rhythm
of descent to let meaning fade into being
where loss and gladness are one.
to the new elite who’d just congratulated me
for “finally making it” to a bare granite
summit. Snark for snark, as snot now is said.
To suck the smazy vista into his tablet,
he saluted the sky as if gesticulating
to a Great Spirit in mute beseechment.
He’d strode up past me halfway up
the zig-zag trail, where I’d paused to peer
at a red eft curled in stiff half-ellipse
atop beech leaf detritus, as if dropped
helpless from on high it could only lie
existentially nirvanic or stultified
in polymorphic stasis upon a world
that would change it when it would,
and leaning down in mid-pace he’d waved
his phone across the eft to add it
to a cloud where eternal forms reside.
My dull village lay hidden behind this hill
made famous when a famous poet
of the old blue-blood elite called
it “foxstained” in a famous poem
to color the season’s colors as ill
as his own drunk mind. They’re long gone
now, those blood-wearied Brahmins
who bemoaned their age, their cottages
torn down for boxes built of glass.
My drab vinyl house sat in woods between
that green canopied Tilbury-Town
twinkling its bay far below us
and a crude strip-mall city far beyond
where despondency and madness
stalk the sidewalks of the four-lane
main street, babbling against truck exhaust
and traffic dust. I wrote sober verses
in lonely woods about the woods
I might as well have tacked to trees
but for a hesitancy to make litter.
Since but two of us stood alone
against the sky, I felt an old vestigial urge
to converse one with another,
to ask if after he’d surged past me, ski poles
churning like pistons of dynamic hygiene,
he’d seen the pileated woodpecker
playing hide and seek with a red-tailed hawk
amid an aspen thicket. But though we stood
together, we stood apart. For I stood
solitary, letting the long sigh of the world
dry my sweat and thrill my hair
while he thumbed a world turned to scenery
off to other worlds kept in thin boxes
not here, or there, or anywhere. Nowhere
to go but down, I turned then to go there,
lonely, yet content that up and down
are one, to let sounds and lights
go through me in flowing pictures,
to let the stillness of the eft,
the zeal of the hawk, and the woodpecker’s
cunning make a lesson of patience
in my mind alone, then in a rhythm
of descent to let meaning fade into being
where loss and gladness are one.
