[pct-l] Bring Guidebooks or Maps?

[Brendan Beltz]

I love hearing about the intersections of poetry and people's personal
interactions with the now almost peripheral outdoors. May I share two in
particular which helped restore my sanity over the last year (and, on
recital, would actually lower my blood pressure at moments of great
aggravation), and fixed my attentions on this venture beginning so very
soon. The first is Neruda, the second an Inuit traditional.

PASTORAL

I go copying mountains and rivers and clouds:
I shake out my fountain pen, remark
on a bird flying upward
or a spider alive in his workshop of floss,
with no thought in my head; I am air,
I am limitless air where the wheat tosses,
and am moved by an impulse to fly, the uncertain
direction of leaves, the round
eye of the motionless fish in the cove,
statues that soar through the clouds,
the rain's multiplications.

I see only a summer's
transparency, I sing nothing but wind,
while history creaks on its carnival floats
hoarding medals and shrouds
and passes me by, and I stand by myself
in the spring, knowing nothing but rivers.

*Shepherd-boy, shepherd-boy, don't you know
that they wait for you?*

I know and I know it: but here by the water
in the crackle and flare of cicadas,
I must wait for myself, as they wait for me there:
I also would see myself coming
and know in the end how it feels to me
when I come to the place where I wait for my coming
and turn back to my sleep and die laughing.

--Pablo Neruda


I think over again my small adventures,
My fears, those small ones that seemed so big,
For all the vital things I had to get and to reach,
And yet there is only one great thing
The only thing
To live to see the great day that dawns
And the light that fills the world.

--Anonymous (Inuit)

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 9:28 PM, Jason Moores <jmmoores1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> *The grime and glimmer of humans in their too close fecund beauty.*
>
> "the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what
> might be left to say in time come after death,"
> "with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own
> bodies good to eat a thousand years."-AG
>
> Five years in Vegas calloused my soul to the beauty found on the city
> streets of America. It took me three years on the North Rim of the Canyon
> before I felt whole again. That big hole in the ground had an amazing
> effect
> on my mind, much as the PCT.
>
> Jackass
>
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 8:26 PM, Scott Williams <baidarker at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > A Coney Island of the Mind, was my first Beat Book.  I still love it, and
> > the Dog that trots freely in the street, and the things he sees.  That's
> me
> > on trail.  Diane, it's just what you and I were writing about yesterday.
> >  Love that book.  City Lights is still a beacon of nature and love
> Jackass.
> >  I love the Mtns.  Intensely.  But I love SF too.  The grime and glimmer
> of
> > humans in their too close fecund beauty.
> >
> > Shroomer
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >>
> >
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