And four weeks since I last sat on a pebbled flat
Pocked with small, scampering crabs scrabbling peekaboo
In the damp stone shadows as the Salt Spring Island tide rolled in,
I roll memories around in my mouth for their terroir
And the stupid pleasure of feeling how lucky I am
To have memories of having passed through such enviable names.
I shall have to be punished for my good fortune. Fortune
Itself shall be required to do the punishing, poor abstraction.
Bristlecone pines lurk near these arrowy spruce. Tense,
I can't settle on the best tense. This wind would have been
Brisk or even punishing, had I dared to set up a tent.
But I was intent on a short walk in the high country, that's all,
Nothing too daring. A sharp gust recalls that the beautiful
Well-surveyed, bounded pitches that get renamed wilderness
Generally remained more or less unoccupied by villages
Long enough to become said wilderness because villagers
Preferred not to live in them. It's never easy to settle vast passages.
It was hot, earlier, when I drove through Mountain Meadow,
Way down below these windy breaks, out on the paths of less resistance,
And visited the monument to a passing massacre on my roundabout way
From ordinary afternoon at work in town to this elevated vantage point.
No one was at that memorial as no one is now on the Rattlesnake Trail.
Winter will settle here soon enough, and skiers and snowmobiles,
And I'll be as much thoughts of those as they'll be the thoughts of the meadow.
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