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Epilobium
“Tell me one true thing,” she said.
Up above was sky, and breezes. Up above was light cascading off the sun. It ricocheted down to them, absorbed in dank and smooth red walls. He thought for a while, silent.
A canyon wren sang, a languid glissade of notes upturned at the ends.
“You see? You can’t do it.” She sighed, her boot heels kicking up sand behind them as she walked. “The wren can, you can’t. It’s sad.”
“I was thinking.” Said to the back of her head as they hiked.
“Not falsifiable, thus unverifiable. Only possibly true at best. Try again.”
He smirked. “We’re a mile into a slot canyon and we can’t climb out the way we came.”
She turned to face him, her brown eyes mantled, her eyelids pretending at severity.
“I ask for truth and you offer me mere fact.”
“You’re playing games,” he said. “It’s the single most important truth there is. Two miles from the truck, and it might as well be twenty. Once we slid down the chute we were committed. No way out except to go through it. No way to know if we’ll get cliffed out before the end.”
“Cheap metaphor isn’t truth either.”
Boots on sand, boots on smooth gravel. Dark stains on the rock, ten centuries of groundwater seeped slowly in to quietly sublime, leave darkening salts upon the rock, the surface slowly penetrated grain by grain into the depths. They found themselves again in silence, walked deeper into the earth in silence, had only the rhythmic crunch of boot soles to break the silence, tracing bend after sinuous bend as the walls converged, until one rounded bend revealed a flood-carved alcove. A shaft of yellow light illuminated it.
She shivered, walked into the light, sat on the sand. She pulled an apple from her pack.
“You may regret not having that later,” he said. She sniffed. “I regret not having it now.” She took a bite, and then another, and offered him the remainder.
“Not really hungry. You go ahead.”
“Come on, come on. Eat. You know: ‘The woman tempted me.’”
“I’m fine. You finish it.” She looked at him long and pointedly, shook her head a little. The light kept moving, slanting up away from the canyon floor. A gloriole of sun around her hair, he thought. She arched her back against the rock and shivered. “You’re cold,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
“Not exactly,” she said.
“Why so opaque?”
“What do you mean?”
He shook his head.
In a few minutes the light had left her. He stood. “No way out except to go through it.” He walked to her, offered his hand to help her rise. She pulled herself up unaided.
Another hour walking, then two, skating over soft sloping sand and clambering up impossibly teetering slabs of sandstone fallen from the walls, tree trunk wrack and sheer falls to hang from with fingertips, trusting that the sand six feet below their boots was dry and sound. The fear rose in him. She seemed surprised. “You’re the one who keeps bringing us down here.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We spend all our time together in these depths. I’d be up top right now if not for you.”
“You can’t be serious. You’re the one that drove us here.”
Her voice grew an edge of exasperation. “Because this is where you need to be.”
He was bewildered. “I didn’t want to come down here.”
“And yet here we are.”
The air grew abruptly dark and he tasted moisture. He looked up. Past walls that seemed almost to touch above their heads, dark clouds passed low and menacing. He saw a flash of lightning, then another, and a low rumbling came, whether from up-canyon or down or above he could not tell. A gust swirled around their ankles, a few wind-blown leaves racing past them on their way toward the canyon’s mouth.
“I think…” he said.
“I think you need the flood to come,” she said. “Each time our conversation veers toward truth, then down it comes.”
“This is crazy.”
“Yes, it is. Here you are in the desert’s heart, your womb, your refuge, and you see nothing but the storm.”
“You’re wrong. You’re wrong! I see the desert varnish in draped waves across the walls, the polished quartz and carnelian on the floor. I watch the adiantum fern make green crowns for moss-bearded seeps, the cholla stems lodged ten feet above our heads by past floods. I see the black-chinned hummingbirds drinking from scarlet blossoms of Zauschneria.”
“It’s Epilobium now.”
“You’re sorry you came.”
“If this is what it takes…”
“You’re disappointed in me.”
“I lost the capacity for disappointment in you a while ago.”
“Oh.”
They said nothing for a time. They walked.
Blood-warm water came in a sudden wave from up-canyon. It stung as it surged past their ankles.
Her shoulders slumped. “Are you satisfied?”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“I know you weren’t.”
He felt the walls press closer. A dozen floods a day across this plateau, a thousand years, ten thousand, and pain as soft as water carves slick, impenetrable channels in the rock. Two hundred lifetimes of disasters wear pathways smooth to the touch. Whole boulders tumble in the flood, pine snags and skeletons of sheep, their ravage one mere tooth on long time’s rasp. He sat once by a pretty little snowmelt stream and listened, rocks the size of barrels crushing one another in its flow. Downstream the water ran red with boulder sand.
“Tell me one true thing,” she said. The flood reached their knees, their thighs. “Just one.”
“You loved me once.”
“I loved you once.”
“That’s one true thing.”
“It used to be.”
“You’re here with me now.”
“I am?” she asked, and then the wall of ruddy water took him.
Posted by: Chris Clarke
Note: A database glitch in 2008 ate a bunch of archived comments. Don't be offended if yours isn't here, or confused if the conversation seems disjointed. Thanks!
un très beau texte chris. vraiment touchant. merci de le partager avec nous.
...
being there but not being present
being side by side but not together
wanting to stay but going with the flow
rarely sustainable is the status quo.
By: By Viziabe Dante on 2008 03 03
She looked at him long and pointedly, shook her head a little.
I hate when that happens.
By: By Rob G on 2008 03 03
“taking the offered hand speaks volumes”
and rejecting it speaks even more loudly.
By: By miguel alondra on 2008 03 04
A desire to prove that one is fit can result in a rejection of the offered hand that isn’t meant to be taken personally.
And if the rejector makes that clear, or if there is no tension to begin with, all well and good.
Context is everything, and my gut response, given the context, is the same as miguel’s. A silent rejection is a very powerful statement (maybe more so to a man? I don’t know).
By: By Rob G on 2008 03 05
One True thing?
- We all die.
Frankly, from here, the games that these two people were/are playing with each other are worth very little.
By: By Geoff Coupe on 2008 03 05
What is “reasons not to date engineers,” Alex?
By: By Chris Clarke on 2008 03 05
What is “reasons not to date engineers,” Alex?
HEY NOW!!! Some of us are having a hard enough time dating without the poets making funny asides about us.
(smiling, of course)
By: By Megan on 2008 03 05
I for one will sleep easier at night knowing there is someone out there tirelessly scouring the internet for things that are worth very little, from wherever “here” is.
By: By Rob G on 2008 03 05
I am only an old man, sitting here in sunlight
bright morning, springtime in these mountain heights.
The children followed me. “Nanpo Tszekhi, sing us a poem!”
I spread my arms wide, opened my eyes wide,
sang to them as the pea hen calls its mate.
They ran off laughing. I walked alone into the mountains.
What is this tree, its canopy so broad
the teams of a hundred chariots could shelter underneath?
When Heilongjiang’s winter storms descend,
each stallion would remain dry and warm beneath these branches.
Why have these mountains’ men not cut it down,
sawn stout limbs for temple timbers, planks for Huang Ho barges?
I looked: no branch ran so much as two chi straight.
There is enough wood here to fire ten thousand pots,
and then to boil water to fill all ten thousand pots,
and then to roast pork enough that each of the ten thousand pots
could steam a hundred bao! I sniffed the wood.
Its aroma, dung with ichor and ammonia, made my nostrils burn.
The smoke from such wood would empty out a town.
Still, I thought, the villagers could surely use the roots
to carve coffins for their dead,
or smallboxes to lacquer and keep rice.
No root was broader than my thumb. A basketwork of them
held the palatial tree fast to the mountain.
Cannot the leaves be used to season rice,
to wrap small fishes in for steaming?
The leaf I plucked made my tongue bleed with its rasps.
Massive enough to hold a town, this tree is worth little.
All men die, princes and monks and laborers.
The ten thousand things die. What was useful is consumed,
its ashes tossed on the dungheap, its beauty forgotten.
In uselessness this tree found immortality.
By: By Chris Clarke on 2008 03 05
“what was useful is consumed.”
By the sheer existence of its canopy, the tree is useful. Hundreds of years passed by with Heilongjiang’s folks understanding this and not not looking further into the matter.
Maybe there is hope after all.
By: By Viziabe Dante on 2008 03 07
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Recommended
Desert
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