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CHAPTER 1
JESSICA MCDERMOTT
Ars Poetica
The bird, like silk on the sidewalk, bird song lost beyond sky, dropped flat before sunset,
before darkness forces small birds inside wire-like oaks until morning. Dead-set
to push the bird off the sidewalk, the young girl turns sideways, sliding her foot, eyes down,
she inches death, staring at its bird-tongue the width of a needle. This is normal.
This small death beside red tulips, this bird is beautiful, but when I pause and look
I say, That's sad, isn't it? Her unheard nod — my not knowing what will remain
come morning. All we have is this sun,
this image, this girl and bird, this undone.
JESSICA MCDERMOTT
Springs Without Rains
For J
I
From the bus window, I see a man smoking a cigarette on his porch. Somehow,
he reminds me of you. Smoke ribbons
catching street lights like little clouds moving ever into darkness. You've never been
a smoker, never lived in Denver,
but I know you've stood in the cold staring at the blank night, wondering at the shapes of windows and stars. Wondering how you
ended where you started, alone on a porch with your memories.
II
Before we got back together for the second time,
you winter-hiked all alone. I showed up
when you'd returned. I thought you'd died of hypothermia. Your wet socks hung on the back of a chair, and I begged you from the couch to trust me. When you said we should be apart, I told you
that you didn't love me. How cruel I was when I was young — so afraid of losing you that I always did. There's still
something about the cold and the lonely men that remind me of you, nights without stars and springs without rains. I remember hugging you there, once you agreed to "try"
again. I should have cradled your cold feet in my hands, should have warmed you with soup or a blanket. I should have left when you told me to leave; I shouldn't have made my leaving your memory.
III
A tarot reader told me I see my fears in my dreams. I often find you there,
in my sleep. I am twenty again,
and we are watching the sun-set peach and fade behind blue mountains, in the valley where we fell in love. Maybe the biggest loss isn't losing but forgetting:
forgetting the exact shade of peach, its halo shape in the sky, forgetting the need to take your hand just to feel your skin, the warmth there. One day we will both die and maybe
before then, you'll think of me. You'll remember the apartment with shag carpet and mold in the walls, your Levi comforter, the lovers you made love to beneath it, and I'll be one of them, one of the reasons you loved, one of the reasons you stare into the night and let your mind run away.
JARED SMITH
Like the Sun Over Primeval Earth
I like to think of sunshine coming over the mountains and filling each green fiber that grows with the distance of uncounted miles,
but justice starts before that because of the lives that settle into the silt of oceans and the so slow grinding of continental drift and the seeds that were planted millennia ago,
the earth rolling over into itself, rising upward toward where the air is more thin and pure and those seeds begin then to branch out as lichen and moss springs at last from almost lifeless rock peaks so that after time has been forgotten, gone unmeasured,
those soft and vulnerable green tendrils begin to reach that sun
that came from beyond memory and beyond meaning.
Like this, I think of genetic memory beyond time and of the seeds of human misunderstanding reaching out and trying to carry human growth one more step beyond this pitiful bag of rags we carry on our bone. We try,
but in the flash of a lifetime captured on media, most things are done too fast, and what is fast is mostly wrong and is buried in the arms of nations turned against each other.
I know it is the little things unnoticed that go on,
that get passed from one generation to another, one Harriet Tubman, one Martin Luther King, one Kennedy,
one Gandhi, one starving boy not exposed to media but stretched out upon the mountains, draped beneath the cosmos,
cold and dying but reaching out toward that greater source of life, that sun that breathes life into our souls across darkness that makes a difference across the raft of generations, that builds justice beyond the understanding of tired men and is justice that brings peace to those we never know.
CYNTHIA HOGUE
Cardiolesque (Phoenix, 2015)
1
You crumple into a rictus–spell of–
pain in chest.
A black cat in the yard full of cactus, mesquite,
appears the morning you have the heart attack.
Earlier you'd left her water.
We leave for ER /
because you cannot
stop for Death.
2
You soar away
to die,
revive.
I follow the siren, the flashing of the distant light,
shorn
from you. Later, I'll feed the black cat as if to save you.
CYNTHIA HOGUE
the cloud of unknowing
for Norman Dubie & Elizabyth Hiscox
I while at canyon's edge on mesa jagged-cut. far below:
an ample cloud beneath which
the river's centuries' flow of late drought-stopped–
a drouth of vertue,
and dearth of all repentance–
I stand in the reddening light of earth's ruin, our knowing
reaching of the tipping points,
to see the length of dry riverbed,
to then cross the bridge willed
ignorance spans,
painted blue to blend with the vaster blue above
where rests wisdom's lucid stone, not rising and not sinking:
I wish this one thing could stay true,
be counted on.
the bridge sways in a widening wind.
the cloud gyres.
RICK KEMPA
Blue Windows
We sit on a pair of rocks beneath a huddle of immense cottonwoods and fuel up on whatever protein and sugar we can scavenge from our depleted packs: the last peanuts and M&Ms, one final slab of jerky, dark and dense like the narrows we've been navigating, a precious wedge of dried apricot that glitters in the late-day light like a Colorado River rock. I produce an ancient chunk of bagel, wave it at John (who cringes), and savor it.
All day we've been working our way in reverse through the drainage system of Kanab Creek, two tiny ants navigating a gigantic, many-stemmed leaf — from the main vein to a secondary one to this even "smaller" one, Kwagunt Hollow, up which we have been climbing the last two hours, water gushing and splashing all around us in the creek bed and leaping from the cliff tops and cascading hundreds of feet — all this in a canyon that the map shows as dry. We were supposed to camp here, where the terrain flattens out for a bit before the last 1,600-foot vault to the rim, but it's pretty clear that this two-day-old storm is not yet spent, and the back of John's pickup has suddenly begun to seem to him (who has no tent) like Buckingham Palace. There's also the matter of the waterlogged dirt road that awaits us in the morning — the thought of which has finally wormed its way into our canyon-besotted brains. We take some serious glugs of water, give each other that "shall we suffer?" look, and don our packs.
"I'm not sure how this is going to go," I tell him. "I mean, obviously I'm going to make it out, but it may take some time to do so. Feel free to walk ahead at any point."
"I was wondering about that," John says. "Thanks. We'll see."
The trail carves a straight line into the flank of a steep hill, the first in a series piled atop each other that form a bridge through the upper cliffs. The sun appears, and the flush of warmth soon gives way to a rising body temp, sweat blossoming on my scalp.
"OK," I say. "Now for the best Top Ten List of all, the one we've been saving." For the past two days, each time we ducked beneath an overhang or pressed our backs against a slanted side of cliff to escape a squall (for neither of us has rain gear), we have been conferring about the Top Ten Poets, Top Ten Novels, Top Ten Movies, Top Ten Philosophers. "The question now is, what are your Top Ten Religious Texts?" John huffs ahead in silence, contemplating. "Best isn't the best word here, of course," I add. "We're talking about the ones that have mattered most."
And off we go. The Tao de Ching comes to our minds first, with its teaching of wu wei, the path of non-resistance: to flow like water, unperturbed and imperturbable, through thick and thin. It is a book we have each carried with us on our long walks, so that we are carrying its words within: Act without action ... Yield and remain whole ... Nothing is weaker than water. Yet nothing is better at overcoming strength.
"My problem is that I embrace wu wei to a fault," John says, "so that sometimes I don't act, even when I should."
"So it may seem sometimes," I say. "But remember how, when you were working your way through the boulder fields, you kept your eyes not just on your feet but on the ground ahead, to figure out which route to take? Such foresight is a kind of action, isn't it?" We pause to process this.
"There's the Bible, of course," John says. "I'm no Christian, but you have to put that on the list."
"You speak too broadly. What specific parts of that book of books have mattered?"
"Ecclesiastes," he says at once. "All is vanity" — which is a lesson you learn sure enough when you take your swarm of dreams and schemes into a place like this.
The Song of Solomon comes to my mind — Arise, my darling, my beautiful one, and come with me. No surprise here: Wander around long enough amidst the naked rock and you can't help think of sex. But I go instead with the Book of John, a fitting choice for we who have been scribbling on paper scraps compulsively all week long, deep and deeper in time. "In the beginning was the Word — you can think about that one forever."
Then there's Hinduism. We appreciate that there are multiple paths to enlightenment, that we each have the privilege, and the charge, of discovering our path for ourselves. We turn our talk to the drama of the Bhagavad-Gita: Prince Arjuna and his charioteer Krishna, the god- made-man, poised above the plain where the armies are arrayed for slaughter. How the god tells the reluctant man, you must act, you must ride down off this hill and enter the fray, do what it is you were intended to do. How we all must do so. This, we agree, is the yang to Taoism's yin.
I stop to wipe the moisture from my glasses, and John to take a swallow from his bottle. "Look how far we've come!" he exclaims, and indeed the cottonwood grove within whose massive canopy we rested appears to us now like a bright green spot of algae in a sea of red. Ahead, the trail steepens still further as it confronts the last line of cliffs.
"I need a little help with Buddhism," I say as we resume. "I think a lot about the Four Noble Truths, but the texts I've read are mostly sermons, Buddha telling the bhikkhus to do this, don't do that. You know how I feel about such talk." Indeed, he's gotten some glimpses of my contrariness this past week: how when he stopped to rest, I'd push ahead, or lag behind when he was in full tilt. Or how, in the narrows, when he donned his water shoes and sloshed merrily down the middle of the stream, I laced my boots tighter and leapt from rock to rock to rock, an aggressive way of moving that plunged my knee into a world of hurt.
"I've got one for you," John says, and he launches into a retelling of the Sutra of Hui-Neng, the tale of a peasant from the south of China who comes to the monastery of the patriarchs in the north to seek enlightenment, and is given a job as a cook. When the Fifth Patriarch Hongren arrives at the end of his life, he invites the monks to each compose a poem that expresses their understanding of Ultimate Reality, and from this he will choose his successor. One poem is posted on the wall, and Hui-Neng has someone read it to him (for he is illiterate): Be like a mirror on which no dust alights. Alongside the first poem Hui-Neng has someone write, No dust, no mirror. This poem, Hongren sees, is the completion of the other, and he calls Hui-Neng to him by night and gives to him his robe, the symbol of succession.
"You can guess what happens next," John concludes, "Hui-Neng flees from the wrath of the monks, who because of their learning — their literacy — thought themselves more worthy."
"Well," I say, grunting as I turn a switchback, "That's something to think about."
John has already done so, at great length. "The first poem is still caught up in simile and language," he says. "It says the ultimate goal is to be like something." He stops to gulp a breath. "But Hui-Neng's poem, No dust, no mirror, says you can't even compare it — nirvana, enlightenment, whatever — to anything. It's something else."
Which brings up something we were talking about a couple of days ago: how this passion we share for backpacking is above all a craving for the utter presentness that we achieve in brief bursts on the trail, when we are not talking, not thinking, but rather paying attention with every part of our selves — "This is what we live and strive for. It's something else, yes, but it is not elsewhere."
"I hear you, and that's beautiful. But think about this too: how it's an equally worthy pursuit, to be a perfect mirror. To aim to reflect the world truly, to refract it in your own light, and to make something of it. For some of us, that's the ideal. The best part of being elsewhere, even in the nirvana-zone, is coming back."
That's true too. It's the two truths together, we suddenly see, mirror and no mirror, self and no self, the cultivation of one and the attainment of the other, that make the mystery. The essence of truth itself is contrary!
It is always risky to say so, but it looks like we have arrived somewhere. We have attained the top of the sandstone cliff that was from a distance the most fearsome part of the climb. The trail threads along the edge here, following the contours in and out and in, progressing towards an inlet that will lead us to the rim. We slow our pace, because to walk a level path between depths and heights, to be at rest between past effort and the effort that awaits: this is as precious as anything, anyplace. We pause and raise our eyes above the wilderness out of which we've climbed toward the sudden horizon of buttes and peaks, and the sky in all its vastness — billowing cloud banks, veils of rain, blue windows of clarity that break upon us and are gone.
TIM WEED
Gunnison Gorge
He rounded a curve and there she was, smiling and waving like a luminous vision in torn jeans, a flaxen-haired goddess of the desert. He rolled down the passenger-side window and caught the scent of dew evaporating off the sage. "Hey," she said, leaning down to look in the window. "Our truck got stuck in the mud the other night. Is there any possible way you could give us a ride up to the trailhead?"
At first he was unconvinced. It had the feel of a con, a clichéd set-up, especially because he could see no other person in this barren landscape of undernourished scrub and khaki-colored clay that might complete the equation of "we." On the other hand, encountering her out here was an unanticipated stroke of brightness in what had begun as a fairly bleak and melancholy morning, and there was nothing unwholesome about her. None of the depravity one would expect in the face of a true desperado; no masked proclivity toward violence or deceit. And in the next moment he spotted her partner, a wiry, hairy fellow loping toward the SUV through the low black scrub.
"Thank you so much," the guy said, swinging up into the passenger seat as the girl slid into the back. He was in his mid thirties and strange-looking — it was hard to tell if he was a hipster or a low-life or some weird hybrid — with the untrimmed beard, coke-bottle eyeglasses, and a military-style rucksack, which he embraced on his lap with bare arms inked with writhing tattoos. "We really do appreciate this."
"No worries. It'll be nice to have the company." Frank put the SUV in gear and inched up the road, a little off-center to keep the tires from slipping into the deep ruts. At the fly shop they'd warned him about this road. It dried out almost instantly in the high desert sun, they'd said, but if it started raining again it would quickly become impassible.
"God did it rain the other night," the guy said after a moment, as if in response to Frank's silent musings. "Tires just slid right out from under me. Two seconds later I was completely bottomed out, with no way to move. It's this volcanic soil. When it gets wet, it's worse than quicksand."
In the rearview Frank's eyes met the girl's. She was younger, mid- twenties probably, and he found her utterly transfixing. She wasn't beautiful in the conventional sense. She did have fine golden hair, but her features otherwise were plain. If you saw a photo of her, he thought, you wouldn't find it remarkable. But she had this glow. This aura.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Manifest West"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Western Press Books.
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