[In Their Time]   [At the Foot of Denali]

In Their Time
for Nicholas Pearson

I like to be there--
late spring at the far reaches of treeline--
when the mountain hemlock and subalpine fir
first break out of the deep snowpack:
soft-sliding blanket that had laid them
bough and stem to the slope
while the weight of winter moved past.

It's the warmth of the life in these small trees
slowly melts through the frozen grip,
and on a day of sun-loosened crust,
a break-through-to-your-knees day full of juncos
and the skittery tracks of marmot,
they will upturn like a drawn bow
and with a sudden springing burst of snow
right themselves once more into treehood.

I like to think of the one winter
when each of them, thickened with the years
of snowmelt and wind,
find that singular strength to hold straight
through the deepening snows;
to have turned the great bows of their trunks
into the slope, and held there;
lifting, finally
out of the slow dance of the years
as all things lift in their time.

At the Foot of Denali

At the edge of a storm
a few drops scatter over broken talus,
deepen the palm-smooth texture of shale:
thin bands of rust, delicate
trace of lichen--
so slightly,
and the wind blows it dry.

Above us the ice, blue
against a dark motionless sky.
A tumult stream buries itself,
its song
a long steady windlike thing
lost beneath the glacier's edge.

In the early light
small patches of moss weave footholds;
stonecrop
wedged among banks of gravel
saxifrage:
some small nameless insect
fluorescent-winged at its blossoms.

The birds and mammals have yet to be born,
salmon to try these ice-bound streams.
The trees have long ago turned back.

And we come
slow and bedraggled, strung
together like beads on a thread.
Long heaps of shattered rock,
dark walls lifting into clouds,
snow-streaked, wind-worn...

Come from the war dance on terrazzo floors,
come from the arms of strangers,
Cold one; come
as though this northern reach of wind and snow
were somehow
all that's left for earth.

As though this train of ice, slow
and barren miles
out to the plain where life begins,
were the first river.

And far down a doorstep valley
a people live in peace.

Copyright @2000 Tim McNulty