We climb the Townsend Creek trail
through rock and misted colors
of aster, lupine, paintbrush.
High on a grassy bench we rest.
Ariel, a year and a half old,
wrapped in lambskin
she calls Fuzzy,
speaks out loud to no one,
The clouds are the mountain’s
Fuzzy.
(No. 88 in a series of responses to Han-shan’s Songs of Cold Mountain)
Mt. Townsend is the closest of the Olympics peaks from my home on Bainbridge Island. I still climb it a time or two a year. One long ago summer day (in 1976), my wife, still-new daughter and I, and a friend/hired hand took a rare break from the log home building project on which we were largely focused. Daughter Ariel (now the webmaster of this site) still fit into her Snugli pack. Her baby care lambskin, then the hottest thing on the hip baby market (but now carrying warnings of SIDS risk if used before the baby can perform the Cobra asana), was our assurance that Air would be fine. I still have a last few square inches of that old lambskin in a file drawer.
I’ve never forgotten Ariel’s striking metaphor, probably an early indicator of the writer she turned out to be.
(Numeric reference to Han-shan’s poem reflects the order of presentation in Burton Watson’s translation, presented as Cold Mountain, Columbia University Press, 1970.)
Post a Comment