Day #4: "Spell of the Snow Hole, Part II" [by Cassandra Cleghorn]

Yesterday's hike, along the same route I hiked four months ago, was another story entirely. Trees in full leaf, 75 degrees, and my mind full of mother.

I didn't recognize her presence right away. A couple of miles in, I noticed an uncommon number of sticks resembling bones: knobby joints, hollowed out as though scooped of marrow, dry, almost weightless. As I stared at the bone in my hand, I realized that I had been thinking about my mom for at least the past half hour. I had been thinking about how my turn to hiking was like her avid walking. If she hadn't died so early -- we're coming up on the fourth anniversary of her passing -- I could have brought her up to this ridge with me. She would have declined, of course. She was a walker, not a hiker. She would have invited me instead to drop by after the hike to tell her about it, over iced tea and Bananagrams.

So then I knew that I had brought her with me after all. And I wondered if I had brought her because I had thought to bring poetry with me this time as well -- literally, in my backpack: Dan Beachy-Quick's slim book, (gentlessness), stuffed in the narrow pocket designed for a Camelbak hydration bladder.

I read to the dogs when we stopped to rest. Here's a line for you, I said. "But still, there sodden sits the half-rot root / Thought digs deeper down to that ideal pain / To drink (as a dog drinks from fen to slake / Its hunting thirst)." They panted in neutral assent. The sonnet goes on, "The poet fills his mouth with names he cannot / Speak, but murmurs to himself that secret / The flies murmur within the flowers they haunt -- / There is none, there is none (and the cloud / Of gnats agrees): aster, musk-rose, flood." I spit my black cherry pits into the density of wild blueberry bushes around us.

I kept coming back to another set of lines, a tangled mantra for the rest of the hike: "I found myself / out where I was hiding away / in the grass I was hiding away / from the grass in myself."

I want to say that Dan's poems had readied me for my mother's visit, but maybe it's the other way around. "How break the spell? say, / I'm weary. Say, / the blade's edge grew dull. / Say, the sound I am // listening to is too small. / How is it I can speak / all these words with my mouth / pressed against the ground? // I have spent a life in the field / turning it over to learn / how to turn myself over and lie / in the field face down." So there we all were on the crest, spells and grasses and dogs and blackberry blossoms and ghosts.

Back went the book into the pack. It was time to reach our destination, and then to head home. We turned right at the same small sign, arrived at the hollow, which the dogs recognized, even without snow. But something made me continue along the spur loop this time, rather than double back.

What happened next was like a dream. Following the trail down and to the left, the dogs were hard by my side, underfoot. Distracted, trying to shoo them away without tripping over them, I suddenly realized we were at the edge of a precipice. I dropped to my knees, and sharply called to the dogs -- now quite confused -- to come close. I didn't know how deep the chasm was. I crawled to the edge and looked down. Cold air breathed up from the darkness. The Snow Hole.

As I took in the scene, sensations and associations kicked in, some simultaneous, some sequential. As with dreams and poems, impossible to retell without distorting.

I inhaled the damp coolness. I felt an upwelling of panic. I blushed, remembering my previous attempt to find this place. I thought of Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia, describing his first view of a tremendous natural limestone arch, "involuntarily" falling to his knees and crawling forward to look into the abyss. I thought of what I will never tell my mother. I filled my mouth with words I could not speak.

I stood, keeping the dogs close, following the path 30' along the edge of the crevasse, until we reached the narrow mouth. Mosquitos hovered near the moist opening. A well-tamped path led deep between the craggy walls. The dogs made their way, tentative, though much more adventurous than myself. I followed them, saying "Mossy. Mossy. Mossy," to steady myself against a fear I could not name. I recalled lines by W. S. Merwin ("To the Moss"): "how you discovered the darkness of green / uncurling into the daylight out of / its origins unsounded as your own." I wondered what in the cleft I was hiding away from the cleft in myself.

We did not sound the space yesterday. A few minutes of the darkness and strangeness was as much as I could take after the shock of discovery. I know now that there's also a small cave just to the right of the entrance, its opening hidden by large rocks. Evidently it's large enough to hold me, a couple of friends, and both dogs.

I thought of Ann Lauterbach's Spell, which I've been rereading lately. (Just now I open to "Nave": "Into the aporia / floats the sum of disbelief / as the parable / calls up its miraculous / lyric -- was blind but now." Just under these last lines, the dedication, which I read with a start: to Dan Beachy-Quick. I swear to you I did not see this until now, I knew nothing of their connection. Shocks on the page vie in vividness with what happens in the uncanny wilds.)

But this is the poem I was after, the last one in Spell, the last lines: "The poet cannot read the sea. The poet hears the thwarted crescendo and places that into the empty basket marked the poem. The basket churns heavily, awkwardly, heaving with the sound of the illegible sea and the that. The poet sees that something is missing from the bluish turning into the arrested night sky, a missing that collapses into an addendum. The arrested poet holds fast to the addendum. The basket marked the poem rides out into the encrypted, unreadable sea."

 

Comments

[Dara Linson]

I loved reading this, Cassandra❣️ Thanks for inspiring with your wonderful writing & poetry selections 💞

[Cmarie Fuhrman]

Beautiful. So many threads brought together to tell the story of this walk, how they are always so much more than a walk. Thank you.