I.

From the false summit, coxcomb-cum-arête,
cool thermals underscore our frailties,
past edges where our wingless feet are set
and the long look down dilutes the evergreens.
As sandstone ends, the world of ghosts begins—
they sometimes rise up still in dreams, my love.
With one hand firm, I step onto the skin
of the abyss, embracing what’s above
and severing spent ties to the scree below.
The filtered light turns lichen eerie green,
ushering in a world we hardly know,
at least not one we’re sure we’ve ever seen
just so, each climber brand new in his skin,
no longer mired in waiting to begin.

II.

The whisper clings beside you as you rise
along the ice melt, following the chalk.
Its cadence is the thrum behind your eyes;
your trembling, the music of its talk.
No longer trust your arms; they’re paid with fear.
Along the rock, the grip that’s hidden there,
invisible but sure, will not appear
until you trade your fast-hold for the air,
and, as you reach, it ripples like a pool
in which your newfound safety now reflects:
the diastole of breath becomes the rule
for governing what atmosphere elects—
to claim this height as owed to us in spirit,
although we risk ourselves to answer it.

III.

Free solo: dearest, I am losing you,
not now (one hopes!) but slowly, over time.
Admit that there is nothing left to do
but re-devote our efforts to the climb,
remembering that the second side is less
than a reprieve—more sheer and far from kind—
before the gentle, sloping wilderness
enwraps us and we let go of the sky.
Your living hand guides home my dangled foot.
At gravity’s unlikely slant, we smear
across the arkose, knowing that the root
has taken hold deep in the layers. Here,
a thrust fault pushed up rock, and, as it rose,
it found its altitude in its repose.

IV.

Pinned to the face, you close the aperture—
no way looks right, and there is no way down
but keeping on—returning’s hot allure
hissing its false promises, the sound
of the last support beam loudly giving way.
What is it that wipes the rock free of direction?
The crystal ceiling that began the day
goes black, almost it seems without detection.
The open door blows shut; the empty glass
brims over and, when raised, is dry again:
time’s bait-and-switch. An hour from the pass,
wind drags high clouds across the peak; just then
the air grows cold. Our backs turn to the weather,
as a way comes clear, ascending with no tether.

V.

It’s when we’re most engaged with other things
that the angel enters, a twist in temperature,
a lightness in the chest that we call wings.
Giddy with sacrament and the impure
gluttony of blood and air and skin,
we look with panoramic eyes to where
the earth curls under and the sky begins,
though we ourselves are of this light-shot air,
senses extending without obstacle,
reaching past by rooting down through rock—
obdurate kindness, heaven’s windowsill.
We are as useless as an open lock,
more insubstantial than a drinking song,
and marked by sandstone long after we’re gone.

Original appearance in Poetry, December 2011.

Q&A: Flatirons

Poetry: Was this sequence inspired by an actual climb (perhaps in the Flatirons in Colorado)? There are clearly allegorical descriptions at work here, yet the poems also seem anchored in the “real” outdoors. Could you talk a little about that balance, if you see it as relevant?

Yezz: Yes, the poem was inspired by a free solo climb, with experienced companions, of the first Flatiron in Boulder. As you say, readers may have the feeling that the language of climbing, while rooted in the real, is also a vehicle for something more—if not strictly allegorical, then at least abstract or symbolized.

I did take care to have the language of the poem follow nature—the sandstone (specifically arkose), scree, lichen, etc. If I had fudged these, my longtime friend and sometime Sherpa, the poet Charles Doersch, in whom mountains are instinct, would have objected. The poem is for him and for Sean, Chris, Matt, and A.J., who climbed that day.

As far as the balance between the background and what I think of as the poem’s more suggestive, symbolist idiom, I must admit to playing it all rather fast and loose. Many of the images are taken directly from experience and then modified to find a place within the imagined world of the poem (no longer the real world at all). After the climb, for example, I had a hard time getting to sleep—as soon as I closed my eyes I was right back on the rock. I had essentially a photographic recall of large sections of the climb. In the poem, “they sometimes rise up still in dreams, my love.” There are lots of moments like that.

Poetry: Why is this poem presented as a sonnet sequence rather than, say, a blank verse narration?

Yezzi: The reasons are idiosyncratic. I had written several years ago a sequence of sonnets about a transatlantic sail from Maine to the Azores that was similarly based on nature but played in a more associative register. Climbing the first Flatiron suggested to me a different, though related, experience. The compression and pressure of the sonnet, its quick turns and rhymes, what Geoffrey Hill has called the “malign final couplet” that “threatens to make [one] a laughing stock”—all these helped to create a music that made sense to me. Also, since there are five Flatirons, it seemed right to have five sonnets.

In some ways, the sequence is focused on the relationship between the speaker and his beloved, but it also contemplates humanity as a whole: its hubris, its frailty, its drive to exceed itself. The focus seems to switch most dramatically in the last section (v), which is very universal in feel—as if seen by “panoramic eyes.” Could you say something about this ending of the sequence and your hopes for a reader’s last impression of “Flatirons”?

It would be hard for me to say much about the last sonnet without resorting to the words of the poem itself. Roughly speaking, it elaborates on the tension in the poem between the temporal and the spiritual, as perceived, perhaps, by someone interacting purposefully and intensely with nature.

Since my natural element is more water than earth, I’d better let a master have the final word (sent to my attention by the writer-climber Ange Tysdal). The great mountaineer Lionel Terray writes in Les Conquérants de l’inutile (1961) that many people:

may think that we were madmen indeed to go through such suffering and danger to arrive at this lonely spot. What did you hope to find up there, they may ask. Glory? Nobody cares about young fools who waste their best years in meaningless combats far from the eyes of the world. Fortune? Our clothes were in rags, and next day we would go back down to a life of slaving for the barest essentials. What we sought was the unbounded and essential joy that boils in the heart and penetrates every fiber of our being when, after long hours skirting the borders of death, we can again hug life to us with all our strength.

This poem attempts to render both an embrace and a letting go.