Once More to the Mountain

By Jim Provencher

Now it’s all mixed up.
I don’t know what’s true,
history or memory
or both, but then
it seemed clear.

It was as I recall
or imagine—
what now is the difference
and who but few care
that I walked that day from my car
with scant provisions
to the faint footpath trailhead
and soon traversed snowmelt-swollen creeks
and watercourses flowing over my boot tops.

My backward glance
took in a past
so befuddled and constrained
as to make me wonder what I was up to
and thought of turning back.

New sweat oozes and trickles
with the work of walking
for no gain but elevation.
On the peaks a few
individuals remain.
I sensed a long winter
of valley darkness passing.

A grown man seeking still
something beyond my ken,
something that wanted looseness
and extrication, rumours
of wild rumination
unreeling like spring ferns
in a pixilated film.

Shouldering a fresh task,
I kept on steadily slowing down,
peaking-out only after the usual
serial mirage of false summits.
It was alpen-glow twilit time
dimming into dusk when I made it.

A few silhouetted peaks,
darkly etched, sharply limned
when reluctantly I abandoned
my summit perch and descended
into nightfall, tracing
a milky moonlit snowpath,
following its cold fluorescence
into a well of steep darkness.

Halfway at treeline
I knew the derelict cabin
where I could stay the night,
kindle a cookfire, read by candlelight,
and pass a peaceful evening.

It didn’t work out quite that way.
An abrupt knock on my cabin door
and a man with a dog, asking
Mind if we join you?

Mind you it was already dark,
and I’d made the cabin mine,
domesticated it with the scatter of my things.
Yet since he was a fellow,
much like myself, on a mission to open up
the season of mountain wandering,
I let him in.

Solitude was a place
I’d aimed for so I did mind at first,
but he was quiet and good company,
a local who’d lost a finger to the mill,
a wood-cutter whose wife kept sheep,
one who travelled light and left no mark.

In my usual way
I doppelgangered him
into the part of me
that stayed
no matter what or where I roamed
in restless urge
and marvelled at how casually
he could name the nameless
five branches of water
tumbling off the mountain
and how he had remained
rooted and married and childrened
in the Sandy River valley.

Sleeping later in the loft,
I woke with a start
and found my eyes
clocked open, locked
into his electric stare.
Caught in the current’s grip,
we held our wordless gaze
in timeless trance, then rolled away,
burrowing back into sleep.

Waking to the sound of falling water,
for it was spring and all
the snowmelt hurrying down
in one gush.  No one there
but myself and yesterday’s muddy
pawprint greeting of my double’s dog
flowering like a bloom in snow
on my white T-shirted chest.