Searching For A Spring And Finding Gary Snyder
Half a country and fifty years from your Cascades
I've hiked all day in semi-circles and switchbacks
Up what passes here for mountains, where prairie
Ends at the fault line between two contentions of
Creation, their action and reaction riven and risen
Into these dark high hills that are still first forest,
And still on slopes here and there the half-buried
Boulders ice-age old, left behind in the flow-melt,
Lifted up with the hills, foundations and capstones.
I've come looking for the spring twenty years past,
Where it begins, and then to follow it to the river,
And the river to where it falls deeper or the hills
Loom steeper, where once I might have gone when
I was younger, where now I have no desire to go.
"Looking down for miles through the high still air"
And below me is the blue cup of the spring pool,
Stippled with white where light ripples through
The trees. We come old now to our old places,
Holding on to the hills, letting the dark river wait,
"Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup."
Quoted lines are from Snyder's "Mid-August at Sourdough
Mountain Lookout".
The "fault line" is the New Madrid, second only to the San
Andreas as to size and potential for a catastrophic event.
In 1812 an earthquake centered there cause the Mississippi
River to flow backwards for three days.
Poetry by countryfog
Read 760 times
Written on 2013-01-01 at 20:56
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