ELIZABETH PASS, SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK: 1995

Working up along the wall of the canyon
The sun bright, reflecting off of wet stone,
The air cool and dry.
Three hours of climbing fell away below
Down to the cabin with the tiny finger of gray smoke.
The southern face rose high above my left shoulder,
The trail etched down from the top of the pass
Like the path of a tear,
A seam between peaks.

I followed a step at a time
The inevitable journey
The air thin, the field of scree flattening
As I approached the lip of the ridge
And finally looked down across the north face,
Over a snowpack in the shadow of the June sun.

The valley below the snow was cool and green,
A paradise, untouched by any boot since autumn,
An eagle’s domain,
Switchbacks buried beneath molded snow
The only way home.
Dusky slabs of shale absorbed the morning heat,
Granite glittering, polished by the wind.
Ten million grains washed down into the sandy canyon bed
Below a bank of snow spread without a single imprint,
Flawless, deadly, waiting for a mis-step.

There, on that ridge above the world,
A steel canister contained a solitary journal
Thick with comments from the years gone by,
Of hikers and rangers, hundreds of hands
Dating back from before the great war.
Year upon year of lonely reflection,
Of those who had been sitting upon this very spot,
Gazing out upon the very same mountainscape,
Those same trees across the valley on the far ridge,
This breeze upon their faces,
These stone formations staring back.

And upon the pages of that stained book,
That day I wrote something never to be equaled,
A poem summoned by the arc of history,
By that luminescent moment,
Inspired by the miles above the mountains
That were still surging in my breast
And racing through my mind.
Rare words fanned by an enflamed spirit
Caught fire upon the ancient pages
Until they stood in ink,
Enshrined in time like mausoleum verses:
Measured,
true.

Looking back to read, I breathed, satisfied,
And stood again to cross the snowy pack,
And descended into the waiting valley,
Leaving behind me there
A poem–the words so soon to be forgotten–
With no more motive than pure contact
With some future soul,
And the love of art.

There it lives today,
High on that windy ridge,
In a metal box
On Elizabeth Pass.

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