The Snowmass Cycle

for Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown 1. RETREAT The sailor dreamt of loss, but it was I who dreamt the sailor. I was landlocked, sea-poor. The sailor dreamt of a woman who stared at the sea, then tired of it, advertised her freedom. She said to her friend: I want all the fire one can have without being consumed by it. Clearly, I dreamt the woman too. I was surrounded by mountains suddenly green after a long winter, a chosen uprootedness, soul shake-up, every day a lesson about the vastness between ecstasy and repose. I drank coffee called Black Forest at the local cafe. I took long walks and tried to love the earth and hate its desecrations. All the Golden Retrievers wore red bandannas on those muttless streets. All the birches, I think, were aspens. I do not often remember my dreams, or dream of dreamers in them. To be without some of the things you want, a wise man said, is an indispensable part of happiness. 2. MOUNTAIN, SKY I’ve been paying attention to the sky again. I’ve seen a ravine up there, and a narrow, black gorge. Not to worry, I tell myself, about tricks the mind plays, as long as you know they’re tricks. If the rich are casually cruel perhaps it’s because they can stare at the sky and never see an indictment in the shape of clouds. The frown, for example, in a thunderhead. The fist. That big mountain I’ve been looking at— I love how it borrows purple from the filtered light, sometimes red. Like any of us it’s all of its appearances. It’s good that the rich have to die, a peasant saying goes, otherwise they’d live forever. Here in this rented house, high up, I understand. I’m one of the rich for a while. The earth feels mine and the air I breathe is rarefied, if thin. Dusk now is making its last claim. I love the confluence of dark mountain, dark sky. Soon I won’t know the beginning from the end. 3. HIM Those empty celebrations of the half-believer along for the ride. Those secret words repeated in mirrors— someone’s personal fog. A man’s heart ransomed for comfort or a few extra bucks, his soul in rags. I have been him and him and him. Was it nobility or senility when my old grandmother tried to drown artificial flowers in the bathtub? Can only saints carry the load without talking about the burden? I want to lean into life, catch the faintest perfume. In every boy child an old man is dying. By middle age he begins to stink, complain. I want to have gifts for him when we finally meet. I want him to go out like an ancient Egyptian, surrounded by what is his, desiring nothing. 4. DELINEATION AT DUSK A lost hour, and that animal lassitude after a vanished afternoon. Outside: joggers, cyclists. Motion, the great purifier, is theirs. If this were Europe someone in a tower might be ringing a bell. People hearing it would know similar truths, might even know exactly who they are. It’s getting near drinking time. It’s getting near getting near; a person alone conjures rules or can liquefy, fall apart. That woman with the bouffant— chewing gum, waiting for the bus— someone thinks she’s beautiful. It’s beautiful someone does. The sky’s murmuring, the storm that calls you up, makes promises, never comes. Somewhere else, no doubt, a happy man slicing a tomato, a woman with a measuring cup. Somewhere else: the foreclosure of a feeling or a promise, followed by silence or shouts. Here, the slow dance of contingency, an afternoon connected to an evening by a slender wish. Sometimes absence makes the heart grow sluggish and desire only one person, or one thing. I am closing the curtains. I am helping the night. 5. SOLITUDE A few days ago I stopped looking at the photographs clustered on the wall, nudes, which had become dull to me, like a tourist’s collection of smooth rocks. I turned away from the view and conjured a plague of starlings. Oh how they darkened the landscape. Surely such beauty had been waiting for its elegy. I felt like crushing a rhododendron. Now and again I feel the astonishment of being alive like this, in this body, the ventricles and the small bones in the hand, the intricacies of digestion .... When the radio said parents in California gave birth to another child so that their older child might have a bone-marrow transplant and live, I found myself weeping for such complicated beauty. How wonderful the radio and its distant, human voices. The rain now is quite without consequence coming down. I suppose I’ve come to the limits of my paltry resources, this hankering for people and for massive disturbance, then high pressure, the sequence that’s been promised for days. I will long to be alone when my friends arrive. 6. THE BODY WIDENS The body widens, and people are welcomed into it, many at a time. This must be what happens when we learn to be generous when we’re not in love, or otherwise charmed. I’ve been examining yesterday’s ashes. I’ve visited my own candleless altar. Little by little, the old selfish parts of me are loosening. I have a plan for becoming lean: to use all my fat in service of expansion. Have women always known this? Loveliness and fear when they open and let in and give away? The mountains here pierce the sky, and the sky, bountiful, closes in around them. 7. A NEW MOUTH Give me a new mouth; I want to talk. I’ve been watching the spider mend its web. I think I’ve learned something about architecture from a swallow. Excuse me while I separate the nettles from the flowers, while I put my nose to the black moist smell of earth and come up smiling. Somewhere in the world is the secret name for God, many-lettered, unpronounceable. There’s a speakable grace in the fields and even in the cities. The grapes ripen, someone refuses to become a machine. And yet I want to talk about the worn-out husks of men and women returning from the factories, the venereal streets, the bruise history passes down to its forlorn children. I need a new mouth to acknowledge that piety will keep us small, imprisoned, that it’s all right to be ridiculous and sway first to the left, then to the right, in order to find our balance. I’ve been watching an evening star quiver. I’ve been trying to identify the word before its utterance. Give me a new mouth and I’ll be a guardian against forgetfulness. I’ve noticed the wind doesn’t discriminate between sycamore and cypress. I want to find the cool, precise language for how passion gives rise to passion. 8. STRANGER The wind gone. I can hear my breathing. I can hear the lateness of the hour by what isn’t moving. Woodrun Slope. Snowmass Village. These are winter names, and it’s summer. The water from the mountains rushes down man-made gullies. Serious phantoms with their black tears are out tonight. I’m close—my other delusion goes— to the heart of things. A young man with a young man’s itch would rise and go out prowling. Tomorrow I’ll choose a mountain that’s a hill, take the slowest horse at the Lazy-7, slow and old, sure to know its trail. I knew a man who said he could dominate solitude. In other ways, too, he was a fool. Once I wanted to be one of those fabulous strangers who appear and disappear. Now I arrive only by invitation, stay long enough to earn my fare. Outside my window, clouds from the west erasing the stars. A coyote howling its singular news. At whatever pace, isn’t there an imperative to live? Before a person dies he should experience the double fire, of what he wants and shouldn’t have.