Poetry / Blood of the Mountains & the Broken Light of Days
I.
How many unfaced nascent
or bursting threads of light
swell and squander below and behind
the surface contours,
the crust of each sentence?
How many implications,
heated and layered and folded like the rocks,
are breeding behind the throat’s flights,
below the asphalt or the spiral staircase of the eyes?
II.
Dressed up in hours the soil and the skin exhale.
Guarded and only partially offered,
meaning lives halfway camouflaged:
snow and condensation, lichens and mosses,
thousands of sweetened stones.
But these glosses only clothe the undistilled flesh,
the needle-bound stony truth in the seams.
III.
When searching for that brindled honesty,
the vistas hiding behind the trees,
the metamorphic skies of the truth
we sweat, we buckle and we slip
we part the waxy fir needle bundles
in search of floorbound threads of sky,
we ascend cold-caustic summits
we bore for water, for metals, for magma
for light and meaning inside of the ridges.
IV.
The truth is expensive.
Seldom can we afford to touch its skin
the precipice, the sun-haze,
or the muscles of the mountains—
Seldom can we afford to squander its presence.
Seldom can we wait for ice clouds to roll in.
V.
Sunburn, squalor. Lava seeps
and pools through the faults,
meets lights, chars the skin, ossifies.
The risks of understanding include
avalanches, rockslides, blisters and fractures,
hypothermia, heat exhaustion, death of exposure
information poisoning.
VI.
And in our semi-desperate haste we erect
steel archways, shingles, electrical outlets and morning nets.
We accept as fixed the brightening twilight
phases of the sky.
We wait in line to purchase daylight,
oil, minerals, and water.
We wait up for the star to move, to spread
to see how much it will cost, to see
where its fingertips will extend.
The dawn is much too expensive.
Let the truth pay for itself.
VII.
The difficulties of choosing words
include the volcanic layers of meaning,
expensive and waiting,
the economic efficiency of wild silence,
and the craggy crests of falsified prices
sitting behind and judging our framings.
VIII.
The dilemmas of telling,
heaviest in sculptor’s light,
include the unstable emergent prices of the words,
the crystallization of fragile implications,
and the cloudy question of charity,
of giving the light away for free.
IX.
The star descends behind our backs.
Shadows stretch into giants and monsters,
lacking space, lacking knowing,
cooling like the mountains into the icy glow.
Snow carries light without heat
a short distance into evening.
Information breathes, breeds, multiplies.
X.
When we accept it, placidly, in fragmentary scenes,
airbrushed photographs, exploding news reels
rather than the dusky vistas, the indigo depths
the terrifying immediacy of spoken words—
the substitutions for the skies behind the trees—
we see no stones in the hills, no brazen implications
no bones inside the seasoned sun ridges.
Let the rumors take care of themselves.
XI.
Sometimes we remove the green-gray
alpine crowns of the mountains, mining.
Sometimes we slip from the cliffs of our knowing.
Sometimes we forget to search, to wait.
We no longer worship the sun.
Sometimes, thanks to the rising prices of understanding,
the circuit of light is abandoned.
XII.
Questions jangle over the rises
like sledgehammers,
cracking the mountains open.
Nothing is less cryptic once we’ve seen its insides.
They know. Let the information
take care of itself.
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An excellent piece. You have outstanding control of meter, rhythm, line and stanza. Of this entire poem, I question the use of only one word: “jangle” in the third to last stanza. It seems to me a sledgehammer ready to crack open a mountain would have a more ominous word attached to it than “jangle.”
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What amazes me about this, and many of your other pieces, is that you can take a thought, feeling or idea to the fullest possible level of complexity and turn it into totally readable poetry. That you haven’t been “discovered” yet (or maybe you have?) is quite unbelievable.
This has such ease, along with its complexity, that it is a pleasure to read again and again. However, I began by seeing this metaphor of communication as relating on a simple level – person to person – frought with the potential pain revealed intimacies can bring. You brought in outside forces, such as mass media. I think it would have been more self-contained, and therefore, more painfully intense, if you hadn’t; but then maybe that was not your intention but merely where I wanted it to lead me.
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