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tread_tramp

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Posts posted by tread_tramp

    Most ATTEMPTS

    in Climber's Board

    Posted

    I've left the car at least five times to climb Chimney Rock and still haven't summitted. Been as far as the glacier four times. Last time I was up there I almost got to the key ledge before I fell and busted my feet..Doh!!

    As For Poets

    in Spray

    Posted

    THE AMERICAN CENTURY

     

    Blackbirds whistle over the young

    Willow leaves,pale celadon green,

    In the cleft of the emerald hills.

    My daughter is twenty-one months old.

    Already she knows the names of

    Many birds and flowers and all

    The animals of barnyard and zoo.

    She paddles in the stream, chasing

    Tiny bright green frogs. She wants

    To catch them and kiss them. Now she

    Runs to me with a tuft of rose

    Gray owls clover."What's that? Oh! What's that?"

    She hoots like an owl and caresses

    The flower when I tell her it's name.

    Overhead in the deep sky

    Of May Day jet bombers cut long

    White slashes of smoke. The blackbird

    Sings and the baby laughs, midway

    In the century of horror.

     

    ...KR 1956

    As For Poets

    in Spray

    Posted

    ...another from Rexroth:

     

    THE HEART OF HERAKLES

     

    Lying under the stars,

    In the summer night,

    Late, while the autumn

    Constellations climb the sky,

    As the cluster of Hercules

    Falls down the west

    I put the telescope by

    And watch Deneb

    Move towards the zenith.

    My body is asleep. Only

    My eyes and brain are awake.

    the stars stand around me

    Like gold eyes. I can no longer

    Tell where I begin and leave off.

    The faint breeze in the dark pines,

    And the invisible grass,

    The tipping earth, the swarming stars

    Have the eye that sees itself.

    More North Cascades trivia

    in North Cascades

    Posted

    I think it said Keroak(sp) was doing it up there too.

     

    Yeah; Kerouac wrote about his stay at the fire lookout on Desolation Peak at the beginning of the novel Desolation Angles . He went stir crazy up there and couldn't wait to get back to the scene in SanFrancisco. bigdrink.gifrockband.gifmushsmile.gif

    As For Poets

    in Spray

    Posted

    Kenneth Rexroth....

     

    TOWARD AN ORGANIC PHILOSOPHY

     

    1

    Spring Coast Range

    The glow of my campfire is dark red and flameless,

    The circle of white ash widens around it.

    I get up and walk off in the moonlight and each time

    I look back the red is deeper and the light smaller.

    Scorpio rises late with Mars caught in his claw;

    The moon has come before them, the light

    Like a choir of children in the young laurel trees.

    It is April; the shad, the hot headed fish,

    Climbs the rivers; there is trillium in the damp canyons;

    The foetid adder's tongue lolls by the waterfall.

    There was a farm by this campsite once, it is almost gone now.

    There were sheep here after the farm, and fire

    Long ago burned the redwoods out of the gulch,

    The Douglass fir off the ridge; today the soil

    Is stoney and incoherant, the small stones lie flat

    And plate the surface like scales.

    Twenty years ago the spreading gully

    Toppled the big oak over onto the house.

    Now there is nothing left but the foundations

    Hidden in poisin oak, and above on the ridge,

    Six lonely, ominous fence posts;

    The redwood beams of the barn make a footbridge

    Over the deep waterless creek bed;

    The hills are covered with wild oats

    Dry and white by midsummer.

    I walk the random survivals of the orchard.

    In a patch of moonlight a mole

    Shakes his tunnel like an angry vein;

    Orion walks waist deep in the fog coming in from the ocean;

    Leo croutches on the hills.

    There are tiny hard fruits already on the plum trees.

    The purity of the apple blossom is incredible.

    As the wind dies down their fragrance

    Clusters around them like thick smoke.

    All the day they roared with bees, in the moonlight

    They are silent and immaculate.

     

    2

    Spring, Sierra Nevada

    Once more golden Scorpio glows over the col

    Above Deadman Canyon, orderly and brilliant,

    Like an inspiration in the brains of Archemedes.

    I have seen its lights over the sea,

    And the coconut beaches, phosphorescent and pulsing;

    And the living light in the water

    Shivering away from the swimming hand,

    Creeping against the lips, filling the floating hair.

    Here where the glaciers have been and the snow stay late,

    The stone is clean as light, the light steady as stone.

    The relationship of stones, ice and stars is systematic and enduring;

    Novelty emerges after centuries, a rock spalls from the cliffs,

    The glacier contracts and turns grayer,

    The stream cuts new sinuosities in the meadow,

    The sun moves through space and the earth with it,

    The stars change places.

    The Snow has lasted longer this year,

    Than anyone can remember. The lowest meadow is a lake,

    The next two are snowfields, the pass is covered over in snow,

    Only the steepest rocks are bare. Between the pass

    And the last meadow the snowfield gapes for a hundred feet,

    In a narrow blue chasm through which a waterfall drops,

    Spangled and sunset at the top, black and muscular

    Where it dissappears again in the snow.

    The world is filled with hidden running water

    That pounds in the ears like ether;

    The granite needles rise from the snow, pale as steel;

    Above the copper mine the cliff is blood red,

    The white snow breaks at the edge of it;

    The sky comes close to my eyes like the blue eyes

    of someone kissed in sleep.

    I descend to camp,

    To the young, sticky, wrinkled aspen leaves,

    To the first violets and wild cyclamen,

    And cook supper in the blue twilight.

    All night deer pass over the snow on sharp hooves,

    In the darkness their cold muzzles find the new grass

    At the edge of the snow.

     

    3

    Fall, Sierra Nevada

    This morning the hermit thrush was absent at breakfast,

    His place was taken by a family of chickadees;

    At noon a flock of hummingbirds passed south,

    Whirling in the wind up over the saddle between

    Ritter and Banner, following the migration lane

    Of the Sierra crest south to Guatamalla.

    All day cloud shadows have moved over the face of the mountain,

    The shadow of a golden eagle weaving between them

    Over the face of the glacier.

    At sunset the half-moon rides on the bent back of the Scorpian,

    The Great Bear kneels on the mountain.

    Ten degrees below the moon

    Venus sets in the haze arising from the Great Valley.

    Jupiter, in opposition to the sun, rises in the alpenglow

    Between the burnt peaks. The ventriloquial belling

    Of an owl mingles with the bells of the waterfall.

    Now there is distant thunder on the east wind.

    The east face of the mountain above me

    Is lit with far off lightenings and the sky

    Above the pass blazes momentarily like an aurora.

    It is storming in the White Mountains,

    On the arid fourteen-thousand-foot-peaks;

    Rain is falling on the narrow gray ranges

    And dark sedge meadows and white salt flats of Nevada.

    Just before moonset a small dense cumulus cloud,

    Gleaming like a grape cluster of metal,

    Moves over the Sierra crest and grows down the westward slope.

    Frost, the color and quality of the cloud,

    Lies over all the marsh below my campsite.

    The wiry clumps of dwarfed whitebark pines

    Are smokey and indistinct in the moonlight,

    Only their shadows are really visible.

    The lake is immobile and holds the stars

    And the peaks deep in itself without a quiver.

    In the shallows the geometrical tendrils of ice

    Spread their wonderful mathematics in the silence.

    All night the eyes of deers shine fore an instant

    As they cross the radius of my firelight.

    In the morning the trail will look like a sheep driveway.

    All the tracks will point downward toward the lower canyon.

    "Thus," says Tyndal, "the concerns of this little place

    Are changed and fashioned by the obliquity of the earth's axis,

    The chain of dependence which runs through creation,

    And links the roll of a planet alike with the interests

    Of marmots and of men."

    As For Poets

    in Spray

    Posted

    Kenneth Rexroth...

     

    A Living Pearl

     

    At sixteen I came west, riding

    Freights on the Chicogo, Milwaukie

    And St Paul, the Great Northern,

    The Northern Pacific. I got

    A job as helper to a man

    Who gathered wild horses in the

    Mass drives in the Okanogan

    And Horse Heaven country. The Best

    We culled out as part profit from

    The drive. The rest went for chicken

    and dog feed. We took thirty head

    Up the Methow, up the Twisp,

    Across the headwaters of Lake

    Chelan, down the Skagit to

    The Puget Sound country. I

    Did the cooking and camp work.

    In a couple of weeks I

    Could handle the stock pretty well.

    Every day we saddled and rode

    A new horse. Next day we put a

    Packsaddle on him. By the

    Time we reached Marblemount

    We considered them broken.

    The scissorbills who bought them

    Considered them untamed mustangs

    Of the desert. In a few weeks

    They were peacefully pulling

    Milk wagons in Sedro-Wooley.

    We made three trips a season

    And did well enough for the

    Postwar depression.

    Tonight,

    Thirty years later, I walk

    Out of the deserted minor's

    Cabin in Mono Pass, under

    The full moon and the few large stars.

    The sidehills are piebald with snow.

    The midnight air is suffused

    With moonlight. As Dante says,

    "It is as though a cloud enclosed

    Me, lucid, dense, solid, polished,

    Like a diamond forged by the sun.

    We entered the eternal pearl,

    Which took us as water takes

    A ray of light, itself uncleft."

    Fifteen years ago, in this place,

    I wrote a poem called "Toward

    An Organic Philosophy."

    Everything is still th same,

    And it differs very little

    From the first mountain pass I

    Crossed so long ago with the

    Pintos and zebra duns and

    Gunmetal roans and buckskins

    And splattered lallapaloosas,

    The stocky wild ponies whose

    Ancesters came with Coronado.

    There are no horsebells tonight,

    Only the singing of frogs

    In the snow wet meadows, the shrill

    Single bark of mountain

    Fox, high in the rocks where the

    Wild sheep move silently through the

    Crystal Moonlight. The same feelings

    Come back. Once more all the awe

    Of a boy from the prairies where

    Lanterns move through the comfortable

    Dark, along a fence, through a field,

    Home; all the thrill of youth

    Suddenly come from the flat

    Geometrical streets of

    Chicogo, into the illimitable

    And inhuman waste places

    Of the Far West, where the mind finds

    Again the forms Pythagoras

    Sought, the organic relations

    Of stone and cloud and flower

    And moving planet and falling

    Water. Marthe and Mary sleep

    In their down bags, cocoons of

    Mutual love. Half my life has

    Been passed in the West, much of it

    On the ground beside lonely fires

    Under the summer stars, and in

    Cabins where the snow drifted through

    The pines and over the roof.

    I will not camp here as often

    As I have before. Thirty years

    Will never come for me again.

    "Our campfire dies out in the

    Lonely mountains. The transparent

    Moonlight stretches a thousand miles.

    The clear peace is without end.

    "My daughter's deep blue eyes sleep

    In the moon shadow. Next week

    She will be one year old.

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