The Bald Mountain

The Bald Mountain –


November – The days have been gray and dry for months. There is a ban on campfires, a danger of forest fire, a feeling of electric explosion in faces. The earth is dry. The moon is full.


Moisture from the mouth clouds and freezes,
Fingers curl. There is an orange van in the driveway,
Insanely orange, beyond reason.
The driver is another color, beyond reason.
I do not know him well.
There is another man, a friend, and bad luck
Follows him. We stuff our bags into my truck, I check
The levels, our water, our food.
The driver goes to another room, removes his
Normal clothes, slathers himself in vapo-rub
Dresses in a plastic rainsuit.


The road is a lunar surface,
Large egg shape stones.
I crawl over them, slowly
Never scraping my chassis
Miles above the lake now,
Approaching the bald
Said to be a grassy bed
Below starlight.


I carry a pistol on my hip
Because I have felt a strong
Dread, for days.
Bad dreams, electricity.
We need fire, but are forbidden
To make one. Distance, darkness -
We will make one anyway,
And sleep beneath the stars.


We park in a clearing
In a laurel hell, deep green.
Beyond are meadows with
Dying grass, skeletons of milkweed -
Dried mud and tracks of deer hunters
Turkey feathers and rusted oil cans.
Even though the air is dry,
I feel the earthy smell of rain.


The trail winds for miles
Across rocky outcrops, through game trails
As the sky grows darker, the driver
Falls back, and we wait impatiently
As he staggers to us, each
Time slower and filthier
Than the last; Each time
Looking like a rolling animal.

The driver mumbles to himself
And turns to me, speaking bad poetry
He has written as we walk.
He records his voice into a small
Electronic device, vibrating -
Disturbing waves of purple and blue
Resonate from the spirit world
Into the fading dreary light.


There is no trace of the promised meadows
And the way grows dark and focused,
At the pitch-blackest point,
My friend declares the point,
We have reached to be the point
He has promised, even though
It is a deep woodland
With rocks under leaves. It begins to rain


Continually; We scorch a brush pile
With a propane cylinder
But still are soaked to the bone
As we blaze away, throwing flames to the sky.
We crawl into the dry tent,
Where my friend immediately spills
The water from his canteen -
And so we spend the night soaking.


A denseness in my nose, traveling
Down, deep, lunglife, spreading
Out from the now-damp world,
From an alien stone hurled to earth,
Long burned into the mountain skin,
Long-living in the lonely crags,


Darkness - Chanting becomes unbearable,
A surreal narration of dreams
Into the night, into darkness.
Unable to rest, checking the pistol
At my hip, in case of bears – I tell myself
I walk out and fire into the night.
The forest stops, grows still
Shapes in the vertical lines watch unblinking.


Foxes cry out in the night, running
Along the rims of the Linville Gorge
Their chattering is human-like
Complex and necessary for them,
And I dream of them speaking in
Human voices, walking in narrowing circles
Defiling down narrow corridors of rocks;
Of mist, fur, blood, and bones.


The morning is cold, bone soaking.
I rise and walk along the foggy rim
Along the soul of the world,
Above the scalp of the ridges,
On fox trails and bear beds
My hands graze the lichens, stones
Wet from springs, from the terrible
Darkness deep within the world.


I have never felt the enveloping stillness,
A dimensionless quavering along
Invisible lines, boundaries beneath
The world, the pulsing of mountain skin,
Bloodstreambeats, structureless, yet taking
Me willingly. I am apart now, have
Left the world behind. I lie down among
The leaves, the soft decay. No time.