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