Utter dark forest, rest of dark forest utter. The fir trees are stunted, & boulders drip a hunter’s green moss. There’s a sharp ascent to the ridge at 10,000 feet. The story goes that Mrs. Chapin saw on the east face two snow ravines intersect in a Y and announced, “Its name shall be Ypsilon Peak.” Lying on her belly M suggested we bring the old script to life. Dark forest beside her. She’d copied two lines of Kalidasa from my notebook, swift brush in her hand. Tomorrow I’ll photocopy & enlarge the original so the script has more bristle. Did you notice the lodgepole needles, two to a cluster, how they curl upwards? Might make a good brush. We’re having a hard time in the icy dwarf forest: stunted trees like our thoughts twisted with the karma of centuries. When we break through and see Ypsilon what a relief. That YMCA crew must’ve felt the same, 1910—they thought god carved the letter high on the slope & went crazy.

Haibun for the Hayman Fire

A hundred and three thousand acres, because someone burnt an old love letter. I’m not kidding, a hundred and three thousand acres. An anguished woman ignited it. Smoke on the ridges of Indian Peaks. Beautiful & eerie the blue-gray haze on the pinnacles, like a riddle of unanswered love. Haibun, can I turn to you for an answer? Coal seams are burning near Marshall. One account has it that striking miners ignited the seams, still burning today. Who stole the payroll at Carson? Under the mesa, fossils of an ancient sea burn, while a few miles south in our forests the slopes erupt in a firestorm. Can the whole bioregion be smoking? Pinkerton agents shot those striking miners down. They’re under our feet with the coal. Issa wrote—

Consider: a fine tiger scroll hangs in the Japanese gallery. The painter captures the tiger essence, depicting only part of the animal. Soft menacing forepaws, and high up the coiled tail-tip gives a tiny dangerous flick. Most of the body’s hidden by mist. It could be smoke. The brushwork is swift but restrained. Down in the hidden seams of our bodies what’s burning?

Scholar Rock

Scholar stones in Song Dynasty China were wind and water carved rocks, often volcanic or of fabulous shape, placed on the desk or in a garden, to recall to painters and poets the forces of nature.

South Arapahoe Peak beloved scholar rock. Fieldguide-wise I see you small, fold you in my pack, bring you down, set you on the table. Thus to write. Halfway up your summit dwarf trees twist in crazy forms. Skirts of low blue needles protect the gnarled-up trunks from icy scaling wind. This is where the squirrel clan got its start. Mountain species homeland, then set west against the Bering traffic marmot road, across to Asia. Against the traffic, past the moss, past white explosive bistort, pink alpine florets, & yew wood boughs. Cliffs of drought & ice sharply crack.

Far cliff gives it back.

That’s why you pause a moment, give the terrain a cool long look. Wind comes gusting through the pass. Next lifetime hope to recognize the site & get right here. It’s an ancient practice. Notice the bristling ridgeline tiger profile. It calls to mind the old Korean painters, who lifted brush, took their plunging lines from nature, set laughing magpie on branch of quick-sketched pine. Good luck. Is this the way a mountain thinks? Look around once more. Longevity glyphs score each random boulder—

—and gnomic verse of inner Asia’s a paleo-human relic? That outlasts ice? Oh golden marmot of the alluvial fan, I place you on this rock above the snow. My pen sits ready. A writing desk at 13,000 feet.

Haibun the Migration of Haibun

Haibun is the Japanese literary form that mixes terse prose with compressed verse. Bun stands for prose, hai is for haiku. I cannot explain why the embedded verse does not simply ornament the narrative. Nor, dear Kyle, can I answer why peaks in Colorado swarm with bugs. Bugs? Flies anyhow. Curiously striped ocher & black this one hangs in a blur of wings above a lichen patch. One unforeseen route haibun took is Bear Peak via Fern Canyon. Relentless. This happened fifty years after haiku went into Japanese internment camps in Utah. Below, on Federal Land sits the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a post-mod edifice that bristles with satellite dishes. Haibun arrived here the day the Dalai Lama visited. You could squint through stormy air to the lichen-size patch of lawn with its white tent. Thunder cracked through Fern Canyon pinnacles that day. A falcon in the aether. What did the Dalai Lama say?

Seventeen syllables.

Do the planet’s precise messages all come encrypted in seventeen syllables? If Donald Rumsfeld had time, he told the Times, he’d sit down and figure out what he meant by the phrase, since it was vital for the war with Iraq. Sort of like salmon fishing techniques, haibun arrived along the Pacific Rim. Then drifted inland. Rogue translators and barrels of oil got to the Front Range about the same time. Today ranks of cumulous clouds hang stationary over Indian Peaks. The prose is not there to explain the verse. The Secretary of Defense is not there to explain the prose.

March Crescent Moon Song

Bow-bent luminous ice peak refraction
brittle dry snow-horn Arikaree
foot squeak no moisture Kiowa pine formal
purity—
And humans? humans always this
        clumsy at love?

Tyger Tyger

The small outfit of contemporary techno-wizards who’ve taken up digs at The House of William Blake had some Americans by for a visit in May. Seventeen South Molton Street—last standing residence where William and Catherine Blake lived. The neighborhood’s pricey these days, the global economy whirrs past its door, and sharply outfitted women go hunting for clothes. Milton and Jerusalem got written in second floor rooms, a sizable hand press stood by the window that fronts the street.

The good people in residence at the Blake house have almost no relics, but they did bring out a single archival box—stencils for Milton—also showed us wide modern drafting tables and high-end computer monitors used like bellows and anvil for angelic techno-designs out of Hell. Biscuits sat by the firebox where Blake once burnt coal. There was wine and a white British cheese. Warmed by the hospitality of our gentle hosts, and considering that the tiger Blake observed at the London Zoo had been brought out of India, I reframed a stanza of “Tyger” to Sanskrit. Had nobody tried it before? Surely some ganja-headed pundit of old Bengali renaissance days—?

Early June, home to the Colorado foothills, west by a tiger’s hair of the 105th Meridian. Icy mist holds the Front Range. It crawls down from the summits through boulder-choked canyons, leaving needles of frost on dark Douglas fir. Evening it vanishes upwards. Red Dakota hogbacks slip forth, a glimpse of smoky forest ravines that drop from Indian Peaks. Then precipice moon.

Who wandered these forests when Blake was setting Tyger to verse?
Ute Indians mostly. A few tough Frenchmen out trapping beaver.
And did he smile his work to see?

The region’s dominant cat is Felis concolor—cougar, catamount, puma—mountain lion or painter—depends where in N. American space you picked up your speech. A Tupi Indian word passed to French trappers. Or archaic Greek, bent to the way things get said Upper South.

Blake died in ‘twenty-five. Five years earlier, Dr. Edwin James went up Blue Cloud Summit, botanizing the tundra, and named the mountain for Zebulon Pike. In ‘06 Pike had gone through and put cat tracks into his army report. By which time Blake had turned upside down a full notebook, and was drafting Tyger and London on the same empty page. The Southern Rockies were still Louisiana—blank on maps in the London cartographer shops.

TOP

Andrew Schelling (b. 1953) studied Sanskrit and Asian literature at U.C. Berkeley. An ecologist, naturalist and explorer, he has travelled extensively in North America, Europe, India and the Himalayas. In 1990 he relocated to Colorado to join the faculty at Naropa University where he teaches poetry, Sanskrit and wilderness writing. Poet, amateur naturalist, mountaineer, and translator of India's classical poetry, he lives in Boulder, Colorado. In 1992, Schelling received the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for Dropping the Bow: Poems of Ancient India (1991). His volumes of translation also include For Love of the Dark One: Songs of Mirabai (1993, revised edition 1998) and The Cane Groves of Narmada River. His collections of essays and poems include Wild Form, Savage Grammar: Poetry, Ecology, Asia (2003), The India Book: Essays & Translations from Indian Asia (1993).