Way Out Over Copland's Appalachian Springs

We dragged the slopes to our feet. On the summit, we burnt our clothes for wood and there shuffled our feet in the hush of the falling snow. We had come out of the scuffed grass. With one look back in unbelief exhuming the long trek the silent keen puffing through blubbery fingers. We pulled the hoofed trail through the trapdoor of our unchained links foisting for new heights. Beyond the Appalachian Mountains the hanging fern on pine dripped snow on moles burrowing in gashed hollows. We paused. In that doubtful moment we rued the climb, succumbing to the assault upon this stilled millennia’s eerie silence. All that time the swivelling blizzards raged shifting soil, eroding avalanches. Below, burgeoning customs unmaned the silent dignity of bisons. All bore testimony to a familiar preparation. And then, suddenly before our eyes the solemn ground rose with the breeze the spangled map changing to the quick: Chicago Pittsburgh Kansas City wild barnyards dry-coughing, pop-corning garages horrent timber ribbed the coasting steamboats the linoleum walls the mild Indian piqued he was by the mahogany cubism of our speech. We wondered if coming so far only mattered, we would be content to build a fire, here and now and unpack our horses. We saw little need to go on. One night the summit might open up and swallow us all or old age would come upon us like a lonely neighbour on a pretext to the door. © T.Wignesan 1964 London, U.K. [from the collection: tell them i’m gone, 1983; published in Fire Readings (A Collection of Contemporary Writing from the Shakespeare & Company Fire Benefit Readings). Paris-Boston: Frank Books, 1991, pp. 36-37.]