Mount Kosciusko Essay

Alan Gould

Summits threadbare to the sky
are home. Particle by particle
the rain depletes the mountain,
while the joist-loosening wind
harangues the world without letup.
A minute, a million years,
there lives in us an inner eye
that makes of time the one capsule.
'Look', it says, 'on slow torsion
this hut swims now, no less
precarious above the ice
than the whiskering rodent
that flickers in the harrier's stare'.

We too come here to learn
home truths from mists which slide
in casual instants between our selves
and our little lives. Attend the small,
how these walls and ceilings are
grimier than a mere year back;
an office somewhere has had enough.
Overnight the rats found work
among our perishables;
I felt their claws across my scalp.

So where am I and where are we,
when morning returns so clear?
beneath us the crust, the mantle
adjust, minutely, immensely.
This is ours, impersonal
beyond the centuries of our longing.

This is why we call
the earth's neutrality bitter,
our minds on the sky, the common,
the faceless, the exterior,
which again is blue and seems
forgiving, pure to the world's end.

*****

From the plazas to this valley
we move through verbal possession
of granite panoramas
spilling crest over trough
from the blazed allusive skylines
toward this recognition,
(being aware, like drowners,
of the desert-llst, of ridges
where the bones do not show,
of birds circling for meat)
that there is no negotiation
with the vigilant stones
which last month made breccia
in three nights of one
who wandered unwary into
Spring's sub-zero mouth.

It's here and it's now
that our mythologies pale;
no giant's teeth, no jaws sunk
in those piebald cols,
no pit for fallen angels
in the sudden charcoal canyons
interpret the mantle from which
fox, boulder, lover,
are all extrusions, incurious
of apt comparison, keeping
their confidence intact throughout
the yearly erosion of metaphor.

*****

There is eye that makes of time
one glass. And inches under the heel
the stilled Silurian is poised to life
and buckle the laminae. Six feet
under Seaman's Hut, a skier
has come into authentic seclusion,
while crumbling bones at Cochrane's Gap
move the tribes towards the mineral.
the drag on thought is downwara, deathward;
the huts, the pawer-stations, ourselves,
already contain the evidence
to tease remotest intellects.
  The meat-bearing harrier soars
clear of heath and history,
ash against the loveable blue;
the creature leaves behind no stain,
 no tracks and no equivalent.
We descend into our gardens,
contrive a measure of our times
less turbulent and less at home,
though night-rain gesturing from the summits
melts the window's sanguine outlook,
carries the topsoil to the gutter.
Our mornings manage the moist of promise,
precarious intervals to replant,
  to believe in the deeps of time.

Mount Kosciusko, or as it is now officially spelt, Kosciuszko, is the highest mountain in Australia. It is 7,310 ft high.