Poetry Magazine, Guy Perkins, October 2000

Poetry Magazine

Guy Perkins

USA

Solo to Silver King Creek
in the Carson Iceberg Wilderness

I started at 8,200 feet already cold
from the low spit of western snow.
Wind and I snapped a plastic poncho together,
an extended friendly competition in the short aspens
						above Rodriguez Flat.

						Sky tectonics
			lifted slow multiplying beauty;
						August clouds molded earth.

I was heaviest upon the long sierran desert
descending to Silver King,
wider and deeper than most high creeks
closely kept by desert floor
and mountain walls.

A third up Long Valley,
King wound deeper still and quiet.
Spit left, and I made camp and firebreak
away from the creek and trail.

			Viscous cow bones trimmed the meadow
under careful shark wings
while noiseless city cowpokes rode the trail
to and from Commissioner's Camp:
troops bundled on single-filed
donkeys and horses rented awhile.

For the rest of day and close to night,
we moles, shrews and marmots flourished
on pristine banked riparian beds,
missing little where we looked.

(Does campfire smoke offend trees?)
Were words from true old songs worldly textures
in the cold that lacked fall's odor?  The front
moved through our sitting: coming, blowing by

			until morning released the captured air
from butt-creased boulders, meadow grasses,
sage, varmints, willows, moss,
canyons, sky trails for sub-alpine blooms.

Slow is natural even for cruelty.

				Rocks live on land by the old and dead.

	arri mutillak
 					"stone boys"

To the crest again and oversized cairn
seven feet tall.  I waded to the line smoothed phallus,
short and fat on the sky round plateau.
A 19th Century herder/sculptor, imported and alone,
reached no higher than loneliness
                            for the heat-of-blood monument to touching and rock.