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Way Out Over
Copland’s Appalachian Springs
T.Wignesan
We
dragged the slopes to our feet.
On
the summit, we burnt our clothes
for
wood and there shuffled our feet
in
the hush of the falling snow.
We
had come out of the scuffed grass.
With
one look back in unbelief
exhuming
the long trek
the
silent keen
puffing through blubbery
fingers.
We
pulled the hoofed trail through
the
trapdoor of our unchained links
foisting for new heights.
Beyond
the
the
hanging fern on pine dripped snow
on
moles burrowing in gashed hollows.
We
paused. In that doubtful moment
we
rued the climb, succumbing to the assault
upon
this stilled millennia’s eerie silence.
All
that time the swivelling blizzards raged
shifting soil, eroding avalanches.
Below,
burgeoning customs
unmaned the silent dignity of
bisons.
All bore
testimony to a familiar preparation.
And
then, suddenly before our eyes
the
solemn ground rose with the breeze
the
spangled map changing to the quick:
wild barnyards dry-coughing,
pop-corning garages
horrent timber ribbed the
coasting steamboats
the linoleum walls
the mild Indian piqued he was
by the mahogany cubism of our
speech.
We
wondered if coming so far
only
mattered, we would be content
to
build a fire, here and now
and
unpack our horses.
We
saw little need to go on.
One
night the summit might open
up
and swallow us all or old age
would
come upon us like a lonely neighbour
on a
pretext to the door.
©
T.Wignesan 1964
[from
the collection: tell them i’m gone, 1983; published in Fire Readings
(A Collection of Contemporary Writing from the Shakespeare & Company Fire
Benefit