|
|
 |
 |
I
Precarious
The dank, wet forest out of Tolkien.
Trails with lattice matrices of slippery tree roots
Reaching round the black-mud puddles
And the slick-slip stones,
With not a person anywhere,
Just birds whose lonely calls are not returned.
The lonesome trail turns steeper.
White-birch groves,
With bark that made the New World’s writing paper,
Yield their dominance to evergreens,
All marching ever upward,
Shrinking midget-sized along the way,
Stunted by the winds and winters,
Nonetheless still hardy, springy,
Strong and supple,
Excluded from the summit
By the knobby granite slabs of marbled rock
As sturdy as the old New England settlers
Who had climbed these parts for centuries.
II
The cloudy Nordic giant’s many faces
Still deter the faint of heart. This summer day
The glacier-rounded granite peak is
Irrigated by a needle-spray of rain from tropics,
Blanketed as well in enervating fog
As thick as Boston chowder,
Threat enough deterring hikers once again.
Arriving here with sliding step
And panting red-hot lungs,
You squint to see emerging
From the pall of white
The great stone cairns
That trace the path
Upon the bald-pate’s epic stony sprawl,
Ever higher, devastatingly elusive,
Till the lookout tower----
Gaunt, deserted----
Looms reluctantly,
A rusty, ghostly derelict.
Here the mountain booms in broad bass tones,
Admonishing,
“Beware, intruder brash enough
To violate my sanctity!
What makes you think yourself
So worthy of ascending to these heavens?”
©2005 by Paul
Hertelendy. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection,
1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA,
94901-5506, USA. This column first posted Aug. 8, 2005.
Paul Hertelendy
is a critic with the San Francisco Bay Area arts website www.artssf.com. To visit his website, click
here:
PAUL
You
can comment on this column online. Please address your message
to either "The Editors" or Paul Hertelendy. To send
an email, click here: talkback@thecolumnists.com
|
|
|
Archives |
|
|