Old Roads Closed by Old Snow, 24 April 2019

The beginning never began; the ending will never end.
If you can prove otherwise, prove it. Otherwise,
I’m not impressed by your origin stories, nor in awe
Of any promised apocalypse, however longed-for.
And if you have no such stories, or none such you believe,
Come, sit down beside me and keep me company.
I have a question I wanted to ask someone, anyone
Not steeped in cause-and-effect beliefs. Does the mountain
Speak in its own voice, if a poet has left it defaced with poems,
Or have the poems contrived to speak the mountain
By pretending to give it a voice pretending to signify things?
If you answer that the poems are the voice of the vanished
Poet, then I will have to disagree and ask you to leave.
A poet is an animal with a liver, a heart, and a brain,
And many, many smaller creatures, invisible to introspection,
Making their own mountain ecosystems in the poet’s guts.
A poet is not poetry. A poet is not the poet’s poem.
A vanished poet never was anything but taphonomy,
And even a living poet is never the speech of the mountain,
Never wholly the voice of the poem, but something more
And other and less as well. Never, not exactly, not nearly
The poem. Cold Mountain is a legend of a Chinese poet
Who vanished into the mountain named Cold Mountain,
Leaving behind scraps of poetry on rocks and trees
Like tufts of wool snagged in passing, later collected,
Bagged, and tagged by astute local officials who emerged
With the legend as part of the legend. How did this happen?
I ask you, my unbelieving friend, to speculate with me,
Far from fixed conversations about beginnings and ends.
In the mountain forests of desert Utah where we sit
Considering Cold Mountain in China a thousand suns ago,
Basque shepherds used to spend long months alone
And were known to carve graffiti, names and dirty jokes,
Occasional rhymes in the bark of living aspens and pines.
Decades after, many of those scrawlings were collected
Also, a kind of archaeology, a taphonomy of sorts,
But nothing like Cold Mountain was ever found among them.
Maybe they were the voices of these mountains, those scrawls.
Maybe these mountains were birthed without that eloquence
Cold Mountain found. I doubt that, don’t you? Wild mountains
More or less eloquent, composing characters in character?
I changed my mind. Let’s not speculate. We’ll only end
By contributing another story, another attempt at legend.
In the beginning, voices—of animals, poems, or mountains—
Never came from anything, never actually began. Everything
Found was found already ending. Our endings will never end.