mountain poem 1, part 2

the girls enter the water, paddle single-file

like a family of garrulous otters

to a matrix of reed-covered ropes

still affixed to the bottom but without a raft

and hang there, buoyant, despite a lack of salt

heels and arses bobbing like planet and moon

pulling the landlocked boys into orbit –

five lines seem to cut through the air around them

I count twice and then grope for my knees

fiddle with the limp patellae, count again –

it’s one of the rare occasions that I feel

my youth was misspent, and I look away

to the east of Olympic Village, to Bayshores

to Nordic Heights – in fact it might be the west

I’ve never needed direction to mean anything –

in the village, I watched a couple dance on the lawn

with hula hoops, beside the concert stage

and brightly-coloured deckchairs – I drank a coffee

with two ristretto shots and boiling, bubbling soymilk

yesterday when everything was different –

I bought the cheapest camera the store sold

and failed to capture mountains

or the bubbles in my beer

or the salt on the sweet potato fries we shared

at Longhorn waiting for Sebastian to cut work

and come climb, come shake my hand –

*

so numb after drying off at Garibaldi

I couldn’t hook the pole loops to the fly

feel the bloody mosquitoes I had crushed

open the mattress nozzle for inflation

put my hair, cut too short in Toronto, right –

what was it that the old man pointed out

to the woman, so overweight I wondered

how she’d made it up as high as she had –

on a distant ridge, more naked than the rest

under the only exit point for the sun

from the cumulus glacier lifting blue

and dropping oily black – black bear?

I only wished my eyes could see so far –

or else, perhaps, a path less trodden

than the one up to Black Tusk

where the vista from the top was still eternal

and the waning altitude air like light through the veins –

but they were out on a little island spotting trout

scrounging for mushrooms thought a superfood

but against the law to pick, just as for those without

permission, a trout could only swim around and glimmer –

in the interior, Anna said as I took out my i-Pod

for the first time, and lolled my neck around

as slow as the miniature waves came in and lapped

against the freezing rocks, these places are common –

I’d gotten up then to fetch my sleeping bag

lie it down a metre from the shoreline

and, once warm, placed the earbuds

snugly in her ear – listen, I said

and she did, and she understood –

I began to think in frigid absolutes

and killed more bugs

and shivered – the huge glacial wall

opposite me never moved – a humility

immanent in mountains and in her

I’d never know except to recognise

as the only altars I would have, but couldn’t

bow to –

*

hot enough now to have a second swim

the butchered breast stroke hurts the shoulder

I hurt when lunging for her serve

not a month before today

but too far back to travel without pain

greater than I feel as I belly feebly

for the towels and my day pack on ‘the beach’ –

that’s what they call it here –

drying off, it strikes me in a hazy spell

of emptiness, that I could leave tomorrow

or never leave – that a Zen monk might have appeared

on bonsai island, a monastery imbedded in the mountainside

a shoal of flying fish taken off

towards the airless heavens, only a short flight

and nothing would change in me –

why then, when I look around and find

the teenagers have left, do I feel

a sense of pity for that decommissioned rope swing

a sense that the rope swing has been falsely accused

and is now, as it will be until with age it falls

utterly alone, and beyond saving?