Gary Snyder
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Gary Snyder
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"Mountains and Rivers without End" (1996)
Ah, what am I carrying? Whats this load? Whos that out there in the dust sleeping on the ground? With a black hat, and a feather stuck in his sleeve? Its old Jack Wilson, Wovoka, the prophet, Black Coyote saw the whole world In Wovokas empty hat the bottomless sky the night of starlight, lying on our sides the ocean, slanting higher all manner of beings may swim in my sea echoing up conch spiral corridors the mirror: countless ages back dressing or laughing what world today? pearl crystal jewel taming and teaching the dragon in the spine spiral, wheel, or breath of mind desert sheep with curly horns. The ringing in your ears is the cricket in the stars. Up in the mountains that edge the Great Basin it was whispered to me by the oldest of trees. By the Oldest of Beings the Oldest of Trees Bristlecone Pine. And all night long sung on by a young throng of Pinyon Pine.
The great Indus rivers running just there by the wall. (The far shore wild salmon spawning in old mine-tailing gravels down the Yuba) Led to the kohlrabi, peas and potatoes, gold-dry barley, come songbirds, a village with flat-roofed houses and a flag in the breeze always murmuring, Space of joy in the life of the moment Om, Mind, in Phenomena, Hum The crooked sickle topples alfalfa, and the sheaves are packed on their backs husband and wife walk singing song bounced between voices down the stone-paved walk to the storehouse and stables, and give some away.
Into earth rock dives. As the mountains lift and open underground out, dust over seashell, layers of ooze, display how it plays. Buttresses fractured, looming, friction only, soon to fall, each face a heap of risks talus slopes below flakes weathered off the buried block, tricked off an old pluton, and settle somewhere, ever lower down gives a glimpse of streaks and strains, warp and slide, abraded gritty mudwash glide where cliffs lean to the raven-necklace sky Calcium spiraling shells, no land plants then when sands and stones flush down the barren flanks of magma-swollen uplands slurry to the beach, ranges into rubble, old shores buried by debris a lapping trough of tide flats and lagoons lime-rich wave-wash soothing shales and silts a thousand miles of chest-deep reef seabottom riffled, wave-swirled, turned and tilled147 by squiggly slime-swimmers many-armed, millions of tiny different tracks crisscrossing through the mud trilobite winding salt sludge, calcite ridges, diatom babies drifting home, swash of quartzy sand three hundred million years be rolling on and then ten million years ago an ocean floor glides like a snake beneath the continent crunching up old seabed till its high as alps. Sandstone layers script of winding tracks and limestone shines like snow where ancient beings grow.
