Dead In My Tracks: Wildcat Creek Utaniki

       West of Golden we leave the trans-Canada and drive north about 60 k up Blaeberry River past Doubt Hill. From the chopper site we can see south to Howes Pass , a long sweep of valley brilliant in a pillowed mid-summer heat-haze. An hour's spent wrapping the cars and trucks in chicken wire (old paranoid alpine parking-lot visions of the imaginary porker chewing our tires and rad hoses). Camp's just west, a ten-minute bezier curve, swirl, and plop up Wildcat Creek, on a west slope facing east to the contintental divide ridgeline of the B.C./Alberta boundary.
     Ringed by glaciers as usual
     Ayesha, Baker, Parapet.
     While we set up camp during the afternoon I'm in a global mode, you know, the simultaneity of the world going on right now. Paris. Kyoto. Beijing. The pavement of Tiananmen Square, the hotlines sniffing out the dissidents, CBC bulletin even e-mail media drama of the last two months still in the air, even up here, radioless, only antennaed in my bones (our name is bones, and your name is my name).

     My Borders are Altitude

     and silent

                          a pawprint's cosine
     climate from the lake to the treeline
          all crumbly under foot at the edges
          cruddy summer snow melt
     soft wet twig and bough-sprung alpine fir
                                                   but more than this
     height
                         is my pepper
          (China
                        don't)
                                                  Now
                       

(broken breaths contour intervals at the next 100 feet and then the sky-remembered night on the plateau above the Saskatchewan Qu'appele oh stars what solitude your blue line and flight or weight the inverse holds me shoulder-to-shoulder my clouds as alpine meadows Newton would have cut yet minds find bandwidth in this topos-parabola chaos around the earth house

     No animals, no print, no scat. (Goat tracks? Too faint now to be sure.)
     No sky-mirrored glacial swimming holes today.
     No fresh water. Heather very dry. The bees buzz. Butterflies.
     Doze in the sun at the bottom of a scree slope waiting for the others.

"sugar" of their struggle death
in China's humid night so far away
maybe that's the simplest equation
for the headwaters
television's human river
and now the sun decreases
the friction. The fingers
of my right hand trace
a band of quartz. My eyes sink
under the brim
far away
but not so far away.

when deconstruing rock
hold back the crude and the harsh
or take "reality" for simple target
the sun
                        a nation as large as China
is just another scheme for thirst and war
another centered project tunneling earth
            (my father's fingers poked wet into the mud of a rice paddy
rumours, the same large-spun sky here
in the thin air and during the long winter
quartz grows with the sparkle of a bridge
every stone on this mountain clicks
some old biotic tumbler locked
unlocked sadness
            not of the hundred-blossomed mountain
            not of the nine-millenia incense
            but of the dragon-slit tongue silenced
            youth before old age

shale shard weep shard shale weep shale weep shard shale weep shale weep
shard shard weep shale shard weep shale weep weep shhh

     or

                                              ee

                                                                                            ent

     ent

                                          re. Pren

                                                                eur. Prende

snow pond fed by two large drifts vectored off of morraine.
no real fish.
the Beijing hotline surfaces as jet track reminder
through the high blue air
then sinks at news of the killings.
deep, like a floating thermostat.
deep, like a disappearing hook.
baited.

smoke in the wind, the forest below
porcupine under the wire quietly chewing our tires
is that it
smoke in the city,
     slow sweep sweep of a broom in the square

Hand-held Pictostone

from above Wildcat rockscape of old Renaissance bullet hole or navel with tracks going out the sides a type of Malthusian linear function along the aisles of a Saturday afternoon matinee forever pocked with edge and gouged embedded pebble from distant beach a cracked and weathered map of textured tilt propellor hummed out from omphalic sedimentary lint enough to tell story's history warped high enough in the diurnal headlines from Beijing and Shanghai so that a geologist imagining fake fish in a fake lake scrapes around the edges for shrapnel but me I think in my own mittened photos of the life look out of and far away from these threads through the hole to continue the prospect beyond impact of landing very hard and fast and past the anima button.

Scale of shale
jamb stone, lintel, henge.

When the door's open
there's nothing to catch the eye.

Except the sun (blink). Now this tent
on the outside of a non-scaled phenomenon.

We'll see, Fred says to himself, the tree
as much a cinnabar flag as

—the mountains folded and folded.
"with uncountable broken arms and legs floating..."

This sky of clouds, new grass, melon
summer fields creased .

By forcing them into the centre of the square
the indelible occupies the heart until next time.

These "basins of attraction"
these grains, these fractal editions.

Night swoops very low
just a reminder.

Far, far down the valley a chainsaw whines.
At night now some of the creeks disappear.
Winter.

clear stingin' peaks
                                            rock green moss
                                                                                           campion
                           all surface news
                                                          inked
to the bloated stone heroes
                                                   massed alongside Mao's mausoleum
same shards here
                                           within the square
                                                                                     a "percolation
                                                   network"

five lines,
                           five soldiers a line
                                                             duende stone
thano-stone