#65 A WOMAN'S BRIEFS: DAY SEVEN -- NOTHING BUT FEELINGS IN THIS POEM

On the first of these ten related blog postings I confessed I didn’t feel like writing, but by letting my old work and discipline do the work, I would write about what I once wrote.

 Let me tell you, now’s the time to send your frontal lobe out for recess. This poem is all amygdala, all gut, all feeling. It has everything to do with sharing mountains with my dearest friend of thirty years. I lived at sea level, and she at 5,280 feet. For thirty years before her death, we shared my ocean shore and her mountain slopes; we shared everything but husbands. I don’t feel like writing, but as I copy this poem, I feel what I felt on that 1975 winter day when I wrote it. 

WASATCH MOUNTAINS

UPON MEETING THE WASATCH

March 29, 1975

 Allow my heart to leave,

However temporarily,

The stuff of scientific knowledge

Piled like slagheaps upon the 1970s.

Allow my heart to see the mountain

Without an echo of seismic information,

Without weighing its mineral content

Or measuring the snow.

I want to see with an eye of awe.

Water washing down mountain shoulders,

Whether trickle or torrent,

 Invites a reckoning with the power of sound.

    Rivulet, stream, raging spring creek,

Come, spill the banks of my sterile thought.

Run deep and force your passage to my ear,

But may I hear with an ear for beauty.

My body rests

On the wind-worn slope of a forest boulder,

And more than warmth is given me.

The mystery of a wind that borrowed centuries

To carve this granite cradle

Lulls me now in gentle, scented song.

Fold away the charts that nullify wonder.

Free me to intensely feel the breeze,

The stone, the water’s mist,

Upon the skin of both my body and my spirit.