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THE MOUNTAIN
WE CLIMB IS OURSELVES
1
Mountain peaks, so elegant,
contemplate the heavens from
various elevations.
Each place the Beloved has set her foot
a pool spreads, a spruce grows, a rose
flowers in sudden explosion
and dies. And always
witnessed! Something with many or single-
facetted eyes sees as it
darts through boughs of a lone alpine tree or
gnaws through dead wood of a
fallen artic fir,
eyes everywhere,
eyes of gnats,
eyes of molecules…
the same seeing eyes of stars
watching through tears this totally
surprising shadow show pass as it
snuffs itself out to
gaze with His eyes at last at Himself alone
beyond the space-time zone.
2
We leave the city on our left as we turn
to climb the peak.
It is all night through the
clouds, it is a
turn and a sudden coral-sparkling
bridge strung out across a
sharp gorge, then
as we look again it’s gone, it only
swayed in our eyes, it only
spanned two margins of interior size.
A hole in rock. A Temple
door! Hieroglyphs carved so
intricately meaningful along its
craggy sides, and the
door-hole itself, square and
solidly there, is gone when we
reach out to enter it,
rock-face implacable to our
touch, rough to our
tip.
Light shows the climb all the more as
distant dawn across peaks and valleys of pure expanse
crisply unfolds these rocks once more
into day, the rock-hard
bulk of them so paper-thin, fragile,
imagistic in their
stance against a
lucid, limpid sky.
You stand uncertainly and slightly unsteady
at the top and watch through
wind-blown eyes the total
visual size of it all expand into its
details and rifts of cracks and
axes of balance and shift, perched on the
foundation of yesterday, staunch into
solid tomorrow’s
insubstantial today.
3
The mountains ring with song
and angels carry their echoing.
Lofty, sharp-edged peaks conceal their beginnings
in a hectic, toothy thrust in sheer
magnetic cliffs and ragged
humps, their ending
as wispy clouds of wool pulled apart and blown to drift
like frothiest spindrift across an
equally dissolving sky, skudding
in a universe burst from the germ of command
to Be!
and made to die.
The middle a rock-hard glory
appearing to last for all eternity
with ravines and chasms
cold as ice, their black
shadows cut from heat and light
refrigerating the mountain-drops
where pueblo Indians built their
dream fortresses suspended
on ledges in swirling terraces, stairways
connecting, the
circular platforms shadowy figures
crossed in their human trajectory under
miles of sky going out in a vast panoply
in all directions
spotlit by near stars.
Mountains in silhouette, profiles of supine intellects
astronomizing the night sky,
Mount Meru in blue mist at the Tantric center of
neither exterior nor interior space,
Mount Hira, Cave of Light, loft above Mecca
where the Prophet received God’s Book,
Mount ‘Arafat, bump on the ground of
Recognition where Adam and Eve
touched down from Eden,
Nevada mountain ridges along Lake Tahoe’s horizons
from the California side where we used to take our
summer vacations and I would
watch their airy suspension in space
in fascination,
pegs driven into the earth, to hold its
groans in check, un-
wobbling pivots to keep the
drunken dance from destroying
mankind until the
Last Hour, when all
matter dissolves in dervish twists and
flings its arms in
joy to be
so bounced around by the
One Who placed us here
for His perfect inspection.
Our hearts with their shafts of light
plunged deep
for the mountains’ protection.
5
Mountains are Matterhorns of madness
in love with the heights.
The thrill of cliff, peak solid with ice,
tip at an angle almost reaching
the full moon. Black
and white,
blue and ice-green, white and craggy gray,
brown with astonishing high altitude
sudden wildflowers blazing bright orange with flame yellow and
red
tongue, madness here, total and
infatuated lunacy in love to
strain the ropes of being to
rub nose-tip against
stars!
Even in blackest night
these mountains lie.
Even in silvery dawn-whiteness,
white into mistier white,
these mountains emerge
as spirit coming into body,
as massiveness lying so
vulnerably small
under the gaze of the tender Infinite
that flies over with its flocks and with its
flecked clouds rolls past
the pointed peaks.
On mountaintops only utter silence
speaks.
A wind comes up with a curtain of diamonds
and shakes its flutes of folds across the mountain’s unveiled
face.
The mountain sinks into its mountainousness.
Eagles pitch their wide wingspread across black profiles
leaning out giddily in space,
whirl and wheel at ease between their
shaped pillars of
solid return
after
such swift flight.
Peak into peak, peak after peak, the sharp
tongue of love with endless time on its hands
playing infinite variations of slow
moment within moment, moment after
moment,
as daylong shadow slides across sheer down-slope of face
into bottomless space.
6
Mighty mountains, a measure past our flat horizons,
kiss of peak against cheek of sky, our breaths between,
I address you from my sitting-pillow, at night,
totally cut off from sight of
mountains
or earth of
any kind, I ask you
peaks, why is your weight so rock-hard on us
when we step out to surmount you?
We set out, and as we go our shape from anterior
centrality storms out more
mountainous, treacherous with
soot clouds and blast winds, yet we have
only to mount you, we have
only one trail and it goes
up, sometimes
straight up, yet with
each tread your thread unwinds of
mammoth size and soon we must
climb what sits on top of us, we must
arrive at the top of what most
squarely keeps us from travel in
any form, or even sometimes
movement of any kind.
A stuck love that won’t let go, a
hankering for sweat of naked flesh
against ours that cannot
in any way be owned
except our own, and even that
is not our own, but
just on loan.
We are branded. We have
landed in this pose, standing up, legs
opening in a stride of some kind, going
up the side at an angle of some kind.
And we spend endless time trying to
figure out the angles
still there to be climbed.
Patience cannot outstrip you, for you are the very
pinnacle of patience. Seasons can’t disturb you,
and angry thrusts into your side
as in rape only tend to
separate us further from our
goal, since such
onslaught only rebounds back onto us, with
coughing reverberations inside our
own Shack
Hotel on our own
self’s mountainside one fog-drenched morning, say,
over
cold tea in Nepal.
I’m talking about the mountain of
surmountableness, of crash
through-edness, of making a
clean break and even
becoming our own mountain at last.
And yet, when Moses wanted to look on God,
God said, “Look on the mountain, I will
reveal Myself to it,” and when He did,
the mountain crumbled, and so did Moses,
down to a crumb, and in that
atomic residence saw
what he wanted, and what he
saw was that he
wasn’t, and that was
All.
There’s a trail that winds around you
for the slow way, there are
halfway houses and various
inns run by
strangers, there are
whorehouses and mosques almost equally
dotted along our mountainside, there are
encampments of sincere and simple
travelers sharing their stories, there are
special stupas and places of great veneration
for the saintly ones who had to have it
all or nothing, and in
nothing found it all, and there are the
ones who weep at the grating to see
their sanctified tombs, and hear their sweet
fine music still, and there are also the
hopeless ones who half
slide down
a slope to
rock bottom,
but what we want here
dear peak,
is that you somehow aid us in our
overcoming you, that you
encourage us alone in the
solitude of our climbing, that you
send your several breezes of delight, that you
loose your crying eagles over our majestic peaks, that you
lessen your heat or your numbing ice
and give us
the
temperature of our
purest selves at one with the
air around us,
or once-and-for-all
ground us.
There’s a cry here. That much is clear.
There’s a shout here
that ricochets through each
dim canyon.
There’s a shadow here
marching gigantic against your
glassy wall.
And the constant and
momentary possibility of
downfall,
but some
fall upward, as soon as they’ve
become as mountainous
as you, or it all just
turns over
and they hover
as you yourself sometimes
seem to.
9/9/85
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