Time of Mountains

Colorado Poet Laureate Thomas Hornsby Ferril

Time of Mountains

So long ago my father led me to 

The dark impounded orders of this canyon, 

I have confused these rocks and waters with 

My life, but not unclearly, for I know 

What will be here when I am here no more.

I've moved in the terrible cries of the prisoned water, 

And prodigious stillness where the water folds 

Its terrible muscles over and under each other.

When you've walked a long time on the floor of a river, 

And up the steps and into the different rooms, 

You know where the hills are going, you can feel them, 

The far blue hills dissolving in luminous water,

The solvent mountains going home to the oceans. 

Even when the river is low and clear, 

And the waters are going to sleep in the upper swales, 

You can feel the particles of the shining mountains 

Moping against your ankles toward the sea.

Forever the mountains are coming down and I stalk 

Against them, cutting the channel with my shins, 

With the lurch of the stiff spray cracking over my thighs; 

I feel the bones of my back bracing my body,

And I push uphill behind the vertebrate fish 

That lie uphill with their bony brains uphill 

Meeting and splitting the mountains coming down.

I push uphill behind the vertebrate fish 

That scurry uphill, ages ahead of me. 

I stop to rest but the order still keeps moving: 

I mark how long it takes an aspen leaf 

To float in sight, pass me, and go downstream; 

I watch a willow dipping and springing back 

Like something that must be a water-clock, 

Measuring mine against the end of mountains.

But if I go before these mountains go, 

I'm unbewildered by the time of mountains, 

I, who have followed life up from the sea 

Into a black incision in this planet, 

Can bring an end to stone infinitives. 

I have held rivers to my eyes like lenses 

And rearranged the mountains at my pleasure, 

As one might change the apples in a bowl, 

And I have walked a dim unearthly prairie 

From which these peaks have not yet blown away.

Thomas Hornsby Ferril was born in Denver, where he remained a resident until his death in 1988. An award-winning poet, essayist, columnist, and coeditor with his wife of The Rocky Mountain Herald from 1939–1972, Ferril was appointed Colorado Poet Laureate in 1979.

Pablo Neruda

Each Friday I'lll feature a poem by a favorite poet.

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1971 - Pablo Neruda

Quotes from the  Nobel Prize Presentation Speech by Karl Ragnar Gierow, of the Swedish Academy

"To sum up, Neruda is like catching a condor with a butterfly net. Neruda, in a nutshell, is an unreasonable proposition: the kernel bursts the shell."

"

Whither Neruda's path will take him now, it is not for anyone to say. But the direction is the one already set, harmony with Man and the Earth, and we shall follow with high expectations this remarkable poetry, which with the overflowing vitality of an awakening continent resembles one of its rivers, growing all the mightier and more majestic the closer it approaches the estuary and the sea."

 Copyright 2004 Debra Galloway

Ode To the Smell of Wood by Pablo Neruda

translated by Jodey Bateman

Late, with the stars
open in the cold
I open the door.
                The sea
galloped
in the night.

Like a hand
from the dark house
came the intense
aroma
of firewood in the pile.

The aroma was visible
as
if the tree
were alive.
As if it still breathed.

Visible
like a garment.

Visible
like a broken branch.

I walked
into
the house
surrounded
by that balsam-flavored
darkeness.
Outside
the points
in the sky sparkled
like magnetic stones
and the smell of the wood

touched
my heart
like some fingers,
like jasmine,
like certain memories.

It wasn't the sharp smell
of the pines,
no,
it wasn't
the break in the skin
of the eucalyptus,
neither was it
the green perfumes
of the grapevine stalk,
but
something more secret,
because that fragrance
only one
only one
time existed,
and there, of all I have seen in the world
in my own house at night, next to the winter sea,
was waiting for me
the smell
of the deepest rose,
the heart cut from the earth,
something that invaded me like a wave
breaking loose
from time
and it lost itself in me
when I opened the door
of the night.