It’s good to stand at the head of the tram;
it seems like facing fate. Men and children
stand there mostly, next to the brochure rack
and the older women sit on cushions while
the blond, ski-sunburned guide points out
formations on our left: Red Dog Rock (sandstone
forehead furrowed like a basset hound’s)
and KT-22, so mathematical. Below us, mixed
conifers, dazzling hurt granite from which
the basalt flowed, and with us the same confusion
as we rise; joy and terror have the same source.
At the top, families head up the rough trail
to mildly dirty patches of old snow. It’s summer;
they want to touch it. Two red-haired boys
throw snowballs at their father. Some women
stand with their hands on their hips,
gazing eastward through infinite space.
Brewer’s blackbirds land hysterically among
a mile of newly blossomed mules-ears,
and on a cliff’s face, a patch of ice shaped
like a sombrero; today nature seems male.
More forevers and more forevers, and then—
I want to see everything but they say now
most of the universe is hidden;
they call what we can’t see dark matter,
those particles straining unprovenly through
what is, sucking gravity from the edge
of galaxies. They’re trying to find just one
speck of it . . . Why am I thrilled by the idea
that this hurried thing cannot be caught?
That this huge mountain’s filled with it,
billions of it going through me every second.
That as I sit on this log, slightly drunk
from the high altitude, looking at sidalcea
in the sun, in awe of moraines, that
I’m being hit with it. Why love the thought
of being struck by a dark thing clean through.
That the little family throwing snow now
in their innocent ways are being penetrated
by an opposite, the main universe, a huge
allegorical black urgency—and we are nothing
but a rind of consciousness, a mild
excess, a little spare color, and not just us,
the thistles and the asters and the blackbirds . . .
Of course this happened at the start of time,
something had to pull away, and I’ve been trying
to love the missingness in the middle,
the caves of wounded magic; I’ve studied
the old terrors every day, the brightness
of the world, have loved the random causes,
have learned the kinds of pain in California,
have known the desire to make from pain
some words that would be beautiful and torn—
and now, I want this wholeness. Here,
the blackbirds swarm upward, and the chipmunk
with one-and-a-half brown stripes takes off
with a prize; the red-haired family hurries
toward the tram under the smooth white ear
of the radar. The mountain seems to push up
through us, asking us to keep its hurt.
Today it seems possible to welcome
wounded matter; the ski-lift chairs,
which have lurched forward, being repaired
all afternoon, guard their incompleteness.
Each black, numbered frame pauses till its turn
then offers its own darkness a ride.