How to Dress
“A lady’s dress is inconvenient for mountaineering.”
— MRS. HENRY WARWICK COLE, 1859
Your fashionable shoes
might be the death of you.
Your hemline catches stones
and sends them plummeting.
Below the col, set down your parasol,
put on the mountain’s suit—
your forearms gloved with permafrost,
your fingers lichen-light,
your mouth becoming fissured
and your ankles malachite.
Slip on a jacket made of scree,
cold stockings from a forded stream.
Take off the clothes they want
to keep you in. The shadow of the hill
undresses you. The sky
will be your broad-brimmed hat.
“The Grepon has disappeared. Of course, there are
still some rocks standing there, but as a climb it
no longer exists. Now that it has been done by two
women alone, no self-respecting man can undertake it.” — ANONYMOUS CLIMBER, 1929
When we climb alone
en cordée féminine,
we are magicians of the Alps—
we make the routes we follow
disappear.
Turn round
to see the swooping absence
of the face, the undone glaciers,
crevasses closing in on themselves
like flowers at night.
We’re reeling in the sky.
The forest curls into a fist.
The lake is no more permanent
than frost. Where you made ways,
we will unmake:
give back the silence
at the dawn of things.
Beneath your feet,
the ground
retracts its hand.
“We had not known steepness ’til now” — DOROTHY PILLEY, 1929
I.
We dragged ourselves from an afternoon wrung dry
by heat and climbed into a darkness so complete
we couldn’t dream of climbing out of it.
The rocks became a mirror for the night
and soon our bodies were as well; the colour gone
from clothes and skin and hair and boots,
nothing left but this reflection of our element.
You moved invisible above. I took in slack,
your weight tightening the rope, the only proof
I wasn’t here alone. When you paused,
I could believe you’d climbed out of the quarry,
up and out of Cumbria,
lithe on a ladder of old clouds,
as easily as you stepped
out of your shoes and left them here below.
At last, you switched your headtorch on.
The world came back, encircled, pale.
Its light became a moon high on the slab.
With a coffin-sized stone for a bed,
a coiled rope for a pillow, I slept
and dreamed I was already dead,
my stiff limbs cooling where I lay,
the breeze lightly inspecting me, closed eyelids
down to painted fingernails and toes,
running an idle hand over my hair,
down over my neck, belly, and thighs,
filling my coat as if my lungs still worked,
then the same breeze curling under my arms
and feet, finding it could grip, and lowering me
down into a hole, patting the soil.
I woke up with a start. The ceiling wasn’t
made of earth but numberless, huge stars
though, in my dream, I’d say that’s just
the light that filters through the soil,
down from a world that can’t be reached
for all I climb towards it, reaching up with calloused hands.
“Then there is ‘Bob,’ the imaginary character invented
by women climbers tired of hearing unsolicited advice
from male passersby . . .” — DAVID MAZEL, 1994
For he never calls to us unkindly
from a ledge, voice like an avalanche.
His feet dislodge no flat-backed stones.
For when he drinks, he leaves the whisky
undiminished in the flask.
He never steals the morning
with a story of a pitch he climbed
one-handed, wearing boxing gloves
and never casts his shadow
on the path, dark as a winter coat,
nor whistles like a postman
from his belay stance.
For, when he has advice
he will not offer it
and when we have advice
he takes no heed.
the valley does not trouble him,
the wind can never peel his body
from the crag.
For I will not have to
love him,
watch as he threads
a way through limestone,
finding the day’s vanishing point.
For Alison Hargreaves
Your body tight against the cold
inside a tent high on K2
you dream about Black Rocks:
squat monoliths, tattooed with names,
routes so graffitied
that you’d sink your fingers
into letters, pull
on the initials of the dead.
You didn’t need to carve your own.
Your signature was grip and lift,
partnerless dance that left
no mark, and as you moved
the sequences spelled out
your name. And it was
unrepeatable. And gone
when you looked back.
“HAPPY” — entry in Alison Hargreaves’s diary,
early 1979, after Scottish winter climbing
Give us good days.
Days unspectacular but adequate:
the weather neither calm nor wild,
your coat zipped nearly to the top,
a silver thermos cooling in your bag,
the sky at Bamford reddening, as if
embarrassed by its own strange reach
and day-old, pipe-smoke clouds.
Above the Hope Cement Works,
crows wheel arcs of undramatic flight
and when you touch the rock
your fingers hold.