Move to city.
Be broke.
Be brokenhearted.
Get a job at outdoor gear company.
Really learn Excel.
Make friends.
Go skiing.
Climb great crags.
Eat shit on a bike.
Joke with new friends about your cage fighting accident while climbing great crags.
Climb sweet new alpine routes while recovering from cage fighting injuries.
Get accepted on a volunteer climbing ranger patrol on Denali.
Write blog.
Bitches.
Falling
I open my hands and grab at fistfuls of air
the moon calls blithe and pitying
over sublimated mist and rotten snow
under wet dark trees
black moss beards
broken old pine needles
last year’s sticks
winter winds
tore down those
Hours before
I stood on the dull knifepoint
of my own steel and rage, held,
an asterisk against sky
blood muscle tendon bone kept
warm dry balanced
sky
air
and the adjustment of light
between narrow dark streaked rock wall,
all
mica fleck shining beneath sodden spring glove,
no ice to help us on our way
It was true what she said
about me being first,
first to talk, to walk
too soon –
doctors whispered abuse
and she said
of my split lip, my grandmother
crying out from fifty feet below shaking hemlock limb
‘make her come down!’
I can’t,
she said,
how can I?
What she didn’t know in her helplessness
or maybe did too dark and well
is this:
The times I have fallen have not been in mountains
Twin scars crescent eyelids closed hood up spindrift falling
the sheer will required to exert physical force against
the abiding law of earthly gravity
is effortless
next to the force exerted
against the hard concrete glass unrelenting
which has slashed my face
and wakes me up
back down again
in warm horrible soft red beds
grasping
at fistfuls of air
