Loving A Mountain
By: Judith McCombs
Loving a mountain is not
easy. You will have to take it, stone
by stone, into your hands & your skin
& into the space in your head that is prepared
for mountains. You will need a very large
emptiness, a very large need
in yourself: you will have to be willing to move
impediments (your habits of eating, of reason) out.
To encompass a mountain requires
"a twat like a horsecollar", an enormous
appetite; the hole in your head will have to be
made larger, by you. (You cannot expect the mountain
to help.) The winds will conspire to trick you,
the lichens shift
under your feet. The trees will ignore you,
the birds throw stones. If you try to move fast, expect
to fall off. You will have to wait till you have become
(in a sense) that mountain.
Loving a mountain is not easy.
You will have to learn how to learn
the slopes & the steepness, the places that welcome
your intrusion, the ponderous folds & wrinkles
where trees clamber upwards. Learn where the mountain
is tired, and where it's unwilling to hold any more,
underfoot or over your head. Learn
the days when the ledges are happy and the great folds smile,
basking like pigs in the light. Stop being jealous
of the dust & the fauna: they got here first
and besides have adapted
better than you will: of course the mountain prefers
them. Learn when it wants you
to get off its back: stop staring, stop grabbing,
stop thinking of it.
The mountain is there, a mountain. It is not
inside you. It has all it can do
being a mountain. It does not want to be loved.
Or, your patience has not been sufficient;
maybe only a galcier could move slowly enough,
carry enough weight, to come to grips
with a mountain. Or maybe the problem is you,
who can't settle for being part of a mountain
in the way that the ignorant tree roots, the insects & pebbles,
are part. Your expensive techniques of survival,
your comforts, your ideas have cost you this mountain:
go back where you came from.
Raise parsely, it's attainable.
Or maybe(oh day of all blessings) in the back of your head the mountain
will move lumbishly, creaking like the masts of a distempered ship,
suddenly, ponderously becoming your mountain.
... or I would say, not only in the back of your head but the mountain will have become the very bone strukture...to rewander/wonder, to reflesh, to retell...
(Bilden: mänsklig benstruktur)