Home » Poems » Best » Chas Weeden » Best Chas Weeden Poems

Best Poems Written by Chas Weeden

Below are the all-time best Chas Weeden poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Chas Weeden Poem

Empty Space

Reaching out to infinitude 
when words have come to an end.
		Yan Yu

Presence, without;
the space framed 
but left empty.  
Mountains float
as a fisherman
ignores, wishing 
only for a fish 
to feed his family.

Empty space is 
space for us 
to not ignore.
We fill it with 
our emptiness – 
and together
the picture paints
your presence.

Details | Chas Weeden Poem

Camp 4

CAMP 4

‘If I die, I die.’

The realness of those words
sent a shiver down my spine
as I listened to the climbers.
It was late autumn, 1969.
There was a pause after his words
and each face made the slightest nod
peering deeply into the flames;
Tom Bauman had just soloed the Nose.

Slowly, I began to put pitons into
the face of life, jammed my fist
into fissures, and ascended slowly.
I delighted when my blood dripped
onto the dark diorite veins in the granite.
For this is life and I believe
in the challenge of the ascent and 
the use of a life to outlive it.

It is now the winter of 2014, and
I wander through Camp 4.
I look at the young, intense faces
as they to peer into the flames.
I would share with them what
has been my own first ascent,
but Tom lives on, so I scream
to a startled camp my tribute to life:
‘If I die, I die.’

Details | Chas Weeden Poem

Shadow Lake

Shadow Lake

Above Shadow Lake, those twin peaks peer down as I rest;
an eerie remembrance wakes me from my weariness
of having rested on these rocks some forty years past
and having captured that then moment in memory.

A mnemograph of trail, aches, sky; of hopes, fears, self.
Twin selves reflected in apposition:
What distance between same place?
What sameness with distant self?

A faded image etched in now silver’d neurons,
retouched by these Sierran hues.  My older palate
savors the bittersweet of the distance traveled.	
A world before self – now a self before world.

I continue to the lake and touch my lips to its surface to sip.
Before, I opened my eyes and saw but myself reflected,
Now I am shadowed as one with the mountains above.

Details | Chas Weeden Poem

Tissiack's Tears

Tissiack’s Tears
“[F]or I was absorbed in the great Tissiack [Half Dome]-- I have gazed on Tissiack a thousand times -- in days of solemn storms, and when her form shone divine with the jewelry of winter, or was veiled in living clouds; and I have heard her voice of winds, and snowy, tuneful waters when floods were falling; yet never did her soul reveal itself more impressively than now.   						John Muir 

Tissiack’s tears fall from her rain-stained face,
her profile one with the lichened rock.
She, the spirit of the Ahwahneechees,
speaks silently, with the voice of winds,
of time, change and the valley's past.

My tent at the Lodge opened to her
and for a year I gazed upon and 
thought I had begun to understand -
but youth is distracted by what is
and can't see what can't been seen.

Years later, I return to her and sit
in the moonlight at Mirror Lake.
As my eyes tire and become unfocused,
I see her missing half in the water -
her half that isn’t, her mystic moiety.

She then whispers of unhalves, and in the 
rippled, reflective waters appears
my unhalf – those thoughts, unthought and 
that life, unlived.  I now share in her tears
and embrace her unseen soul.

Details | Chas Weeden Poem

Death Valley

What lives deep within?
Which thoughts, what vitality?
For from these must we emerge,
As there is little without
Except the baleful wind
Whining across bleached dunes.

Death is a void of expression
Stark, barren, arid.
Mere rocks scoured by flash flood
Twisted and gnarled;
Gravestones of salt extrusion
From emergent times.

What life there is in Death Valley
Lives underground and waits
For night or brief rain;
But then it must express
Whatever it is, for death 
Is to fail to come forth.

There are two deaths
In Death Valley:
The first is not to emerge
When that moment comes,
The second is that there is 
Nothing to emerge.

Details | Chas Weeden Poem

Desecrate Descartes

Decry and damn dualism,
  for what has it wrought?
Our delusion of soul
  of separation and isolation,
Minds endlessly abstracted
  by manipulating surmise

Let’s start again – tabula rasa,
  and let us close our eyes
To vanish into an emptiness –
  thence to emerge to the 
Singularity of All which is where 
  this began in the Beginning.

Details | Chas Weeden Poem

River's Edge

Our fishing guide thought I wanted to catch fish –
that I had come to the River’s Edge to catch
a mottled Brown for a mantled photograph.

I should have told him that I cared not for a fish
for my father had recently passed away 
and I held his rod of beautiful bamboo.

I had come only to cast into my memory’s mist –
to hear the line sing my father’s song
and again his voice arise from a riffle.

Many mornings he held my hand to teach me
to find the rhythm of the line then extend 
to mirror and become the water.

From a rock, I cast into pocket water
where a Brown watches but then chooses
not to strike the timelessness of the past,
at the river’s edge.

Details | Chas Weeden Poem

Sequoia

(Poem included in the Poems of Yosemite chapbook.)

Ineffable – 
Still, I write these lines
                          trite.
A scaffold of words
which whence removed 
casts only a silence 
of long shadows.
To you, the paradigm
of living time,
I write ephemeral 
wordless words.

You say nothing
though the wind wafts
words which speak 
beyond words to each.
The sound of wind 
continues in the stillness
and reaches into 
the logos which 
spells the visitors
deeper than these.

You speak centuries –
the entire time
of our adolescence –
when you’ve watched 
as we wrestle with 
the worst of nature.
You were made for fire
and your cambium grows 
thick bark and fibers
over the scars. 

Does too our tissue 
grow over scars?
Wars, devastations?
Will these as well clear
the understory?
But you don’t create fire
you endure it.  
Is that the difference?
This is your nature,
share and compare us ours.

We see your exposed rings 
and the markers 
telling us which ring 
belongs to Christ
and the Inquisition.
I see my ring
but not the current
as only the living
scribe those rings 
and they are being written.

Poetry overcomes time 
and endows the ephemeral 
with permanence.
Your permanence 
is presence and in 
this silence of time
the visitors sense
then understand – 
they’ve come not to see you
but themselves.

Details | Chas Weeden Poem

Tribute To Honnold

Right foot into this little dimple that you can toe in on aggressively so it’s opposing the left hand, then you can, like, zag over across to this flat, down-pulling crimp that’s small but you can bite it.
[From Honnold’s climbing notebook.]

For me, the most transcendental feat –
your smeared soles at Freeblast Slabs,
your shoulder jammed into Offwidth 
and cardiac-kick at the Boulder
were: Inspirational; unimaginable. 
We sit in theatre chairs white-gripping 
our armrests and, too often, eyes closed.
Up on El Cap as much as we’ll e’er be,
We twist our bodies in synchrony.
We’ve seen how immeasurable
the possible; the achievable 
of the inconceivable.  At last, 
an image beyond the past; a hero 
of no vanquished enemy, 
brawling limitless potentiality.
Following your lead, we reimagine 
how we might ascend our vallied lives.

Details | Chas Weeden Poem

Below Cathedral Peak

Alone, I camp below Cathedral Peak – 

God, I know you’re not whom we say you are
and you should have a good case for slander –
What fantastic tales we tell about you; 
I wonder if the more nonsensical,
absurdly makes you more believable.  
As the night sky ascends from below
until only the mountain’s white peak glows,
I perpend how you are our double-bind –
Antithetical, yet inevitable;
omnipotent, yet shirking the onus
of sin, disease and immorality.
 
I have back-tracked my last fifty years 
from the convenience of nihilism
and of nullity which once embraced me;
I loved that luxury of arrogance
and conceit to everywhere forswear faith.
Over years, I’ve shed those simple vestments
to now plea the argument’s antipode –
but not Faith.  What emerged is a mountain 
from igneous intrusion and ascend’d
within until it now glows as beacon.

I, a conjoined blind man with elephant 
unable to wrest the entirety,
but these mere three aspects of your being:
I do know of your love; your love of beauty 
and your love of life.  These would and could not
Not otherwise emerge from the darkness 
and the absolute void of space. 
Nullity is too facile and stays so 
unless there’s more – More, for black begets black
and cannot create something from nothing.

One should not grow old without seeing 
that there is something; that an is, Is;
a wisdom and grace that originates.  
It is hard to deny both denial
and a god who cares for prayer, penitence 
and sacrifice.  Here, below Cathedral Peak,
an epiphanic edifice, I see 
god as nurturing and maternal light
acclaiming whatever progress we might.
From such care transcribed, we resolve the angst
of our double-bind and write of new grace
for both child and parent to embrace.