BLAST PRESS at gregglory.com

Floating feathers flutter, fall on my face, in my hair. They are damp, these feathers, licks of wet, little and little they fall and evenly as flakes they soak me. Their dampness is at once ancient and fresh. This falling and licking and falling has been going on for a long time already. My skin has been thickening like a pushed river for a long time as well. I don’t want to feel my skeleton any more, just the river rushing. Some version of the eternal is happening to me, has always been happening, however one says such things as the chill clings and melts and one goes lovingly from walking through woods to being all surface, only surface, clinging to the sensation of the cold licks, opening into them, flying like a runaway kite out beyond the trees and time forever and ever.

As for Shakespeare, there is no matter of mastery, no misery of “doing as well as” or “doing better than.” There is only, properly considered, submission to what is. And in this submission there is no defeat, no abjection, no down-heartedness, only recognition and delight, perpetual delight. Shakespeare sees the inspired man not as Inspired or Religious, but as a human man in those conditions of inspiration or God-apprehension. As such, these men and women are but quantities in the great experiment of living, an endless variegation of type and trope that Darwin would never consider to be a dwindling. What one human being is capable of experiencing, even in imagination, becomes what he “knows,” so long as he consistently refuses to “know” in the sense of comprehensively understand or contain. Touching the water’s rills we disturb and destroy them, but gain the experience of touching wetness. The knower says “I have touched this water-rill!” The delighted observer says “My hand is wet, how wonderful.”

With this generous, experience-extending Shakespeare I wandered among the crooks and crowns of Yosemite. His wily beard and wicked eyes never had me longing for “more” or “other,” but instead left me to linger at lakesides or bade me peep daringly through a dangerous overhang of pine for yet another gloss on Half Dome. I laughed at myself as I slipped on the red sand during my jog back down the Upper Yosemite Falls trail, saving my ass only by grabbing the stolid post of the warning sign “Sandy rocks can be slippery.” The Bard walks with me because he enlivens me. By refusing to assert divinity in man, he allows what imminences appear to glow in every unguarded moment. Every sandgrain is capacious, every boulder shoulders forth a burgeoning cosmos. And what shall I say of the stars that litter the velvet field?

Half Dome goes up like a soap bubble from a toy pipe. From any distance, seen while you put away a corn dog or roasted banana at the valley cabin picnic tables, or glimpsed as you brush past a bushy pine branch in your meander up the Lower Falls, Half Dome appears delicate, improvised from air, palely unreal as a Martian landing craft or the fat end of a telescope viewed a century before Galileo. Indeed, Half Dome could be a fallen inversion of the Moon, all the mystic glow and mystery of her motion brought to ground. Every other year a few souls slip off into death attempting her ascent, like old Renaissance mariners pouring over the flat edge of the map, angry elaborate cherubs blowing at their backs as the known ocean becomes a steaming waterfall. Standing warily alone, off-trail by a few tens of yards, a thin wind flaps the tip of my collar into my mouth. It is so simple, standing here looking up as if some shouting finger had spotted Superman in an indicated corner of the sky, to imagine Neil Armstrong striding up the side of Half Dome in his astronaut suit, his clown shape bouncing in balletic timelapse arcs, to plant a wired American flag in grey powder at the crest of the rock, a lofty poem bubbling spontaneously to his lips, rolling around in his bubble-helmet behind the golden faceplate.

At the new, beautiful, alarmingly cubed Jewish Museum in downtown San Francisco was displayed, behind glass, a cheap T-shirt with a big-nosed camper hiking uphill to Half Dome, a jaunty slogan underneath him proclaiming with Hebraic hilarity: “Yo, Semite!” So, in the spirit of permissiveness (if not exactly with permission), I feel well-allowed to conflate this American Indian “sacred ground” into a collaborative collusion with the Pentateuch. Here Moses hiked. Here, between frozen waters and snow-cloven cliffs, above burned forest, in a mist of lakes, under the shelter of millennial Sequoia, the soul confronted exile from God. A people wandered in faithful ignorance, cursed their sanctified maker, were lost and were made whole. The test of obedience was taken with skin-and-bones, tense with the sense of banishment from a not-yet-visited “land of milk and honey.” How long and how longingly we will walk up what high hills on the strength of a promise believed in–far more than for a promise delivered (yesterday’s news, old stories to wrap fish in). Give me the Heaven whose frankincense I have not yet whiffed, but have imagined all my days driving through Staten Island and its wafting landfills: Arthur Kills, et al.

Slaves and lovers live in expectation, but Old Pharoah and the Pope demand a Michelangelo in harness to forge their golden thrones by the date affirmed on the invoice. Whose eyes, then, see truer? Those whose eyes see the golden now of getting-what-they-want (be it a Manhattan condo, a tax break, or refurbished tits on the wife) or those who see Freedomland from their place in line on an endless chain-gang? Do both equally “look within and love without?” Would you take a betting man’s hunch at the answer? I put one sockless, wrenched, semi-exhausted foot on the foot of the Falls, the Yo-semite Falls, and hope that lack of traction and the packed snows of a lonely winter won’t stop me before I reach the tippity-top.

Catching up with lost time, the scraggy barefaced trail along that rocky patch of the Upper Yosemite Falls starts to churn beneath my sneakers like hourglass sands in a bad dream. The florid human sight of others pacing back down the trail, down the tough cliff, with their proud relaxed shoulders-back bearing becomes intolerable to my sweaty sense of a race that I am losing one slo-mo stride at a time. What handholds I reach bite my fingertips with ragged sandstone. Leaves titter gaily in the dark foliage, loving the bright beacon of the sun, that searing bullet aimed by the gun of the cosmos at the back of my neck. Ants are decamping all along my spine, marching on stilts of whittled toothpicks as they sing in fierce camaraderie. And still my heart pounds out the remorseless rhetoric of loss: lost time, lost chances, forgotten loves floating up miragelike, unreachable then, impossible to contemplate now without exquisite pain. Time is against me. I’ll never hit the snowline before nightfall, my pockets will be empty. The falls, which I have crawled all this way to visit in their garish interplay of light, will stumble down the cliff invisibly all night, drunkenly determined to get to the bottom of something. The rainbow everyone talks about, jumping out like a lucky leprechaun from an odd, rare dome of snow and ice at mid-falls, and that hand-sized postcards offer so faithfully in miniature, will have vanished, my luck run out. No moon is due until late, late. Too late, I have started out on this journey in life. Too late, I think; my body knows it is too late. No one will read this. No children will succeed me or venerate my name.

A golden carafe is set before me, an inverted wasserfall rising within it, foaming at the open top of the carafe, having ascended the slick cliff-face from the flat bottom. It is boldly cold, while I am a burning rock set long enough in slow ceremonial fires to make the sweat lodge water resurrect as steam when it is poured adoringly over the hot top of my bald head. The bar at the Yosemite retreat is made of solid brunette wood, while behind me vast windows vault across the shallow cave opening, yawning wide to showcase topless cliffs and skies. I am the retina at the back of the eyeball, squatting like a practiced catcher over the optic nerve. I see all. I am nothing. Yosemite Falls flows down into me, channeled by the little cold saffron waterfall in my glass, entering deeply to become an underground river that moves noiselessly over hidden rocks and around stalactites glorious as irises should a flashlight ever find them. I am growing golden as I sip, boundless as a cornfield in Iowa, bright as Blake’s blazing designs for Beulah. Hilarity ripples up from my toes, unzippering my knees, coalescing to a culpable blush at my ears. A slice of night curves along the curve inside my stomach as I wait for little Michele to climb down the mountain, blowing a starry hungry wind through me with a two-fingered whistle, the sound empty as a uniformed conductor’s hollow hoot when the midnight train pushes from the station like toothpaste from its sloping tube. Such hunger, such emptiness! Now I am lonely and abandoned in my cave, no mother will return to my crib, tired and happy, brushing a black curl back from her worried forehead. I will die alone, an uprooted weed left to bake on the blacktop. I turn around again, facing the bar, patting my pockets for all I have lost, all the things I am going to lose. And… ah… money enough. Another golden carafe appears before me, shining in silver sweat. A sheaf of fresh wheat, a beer. I am not alone, mother is bending to the creaking crib. I can sleep.

Tonight, can I step like starlight, everywhere at once? In the small cabin my compatriot lies sleeping, heavy. I do not know where her dreams are flying her under the quilted comforter, squared and colored as a farmfield. I go buoyantly beyond the floodlit pavement of our campground and get to downy pine needles shaken into the night’s layers of black coal dust. It is like walking on the backs of sleeping chickens, the pine smell as sharp as the scented Christmastree cut-out that swings from the rearview. Now the moon is pulling individual trees from black waters into the skyline. I hear the stream that we had crossed over hastily on our way into camp coming toward me in the dark, its bridge as short as an unrolled fire-escape ladder dangling from the second floor of a burning house. I swing myself around the rude log bannister and land in a talus of highway gravel with a crunchy splash. The cold water wakes my foot up completely, and for some reason I begin to cry. Here, in the shadowed dell, the moon-water is all silver snakes swaying away from me, their hisses as indecipherable as the gospels. If I let a tear down into the brightening stream, would the snakes carry it on their backs until I am healed?

Walking with a heavy bucket of water, awkwardly, like carrying a small child suspended by the wrists, I like it when the water slaps over the lip. It’s like when the body, too full of happiness, lets some laughter spill out. My pantleg darkens, and my shoe squeaks for the rest of the day.

Water-skimmers skate over the coppergreen surface easily, quickening the life that goes on under their feet. An old man walks around his potato field in the cinnamon dusk the same way, casting his body’s light into the hidden tubers. In front of me one of the water-skimmers emerges from the shade of a fungus-ridden log half on the bank, half fallen in the slimy water. A fish pushes the water open, emerging into the air world like a torpedo and slips the skimmer into itself too fast for me to see what kind of fish it is. The activity is quick yet prayerful, fraught with a mystery that keeps monks awake beside their cots at midnight. As I retrace my steps through the dapple-camouflaged wood back to the cafeteria, I sense, with a skimmer’s agile languor, how the small stones in the earth swirl in my wake in the drowsy afternoon dazzle.

Something wakes us in the middle of the night. A feeling comes, vaguely imperative, a crick in the back perhaps, a something important happening in the provinces of the forgotten body, the body we have left behind in dreams to become the Prince of Tyre, to wear a mask of rock, to bear blindingly the shield of chrysoprase that Arcite bore against cloudy dragons…. But what was it really that woke us?

A hand moves behind the heavy curtain, reaching out, fingertips of cloth touching us softly, deeply, completely in sleep. Is this some memory our day life will not abide? A ghost too shy to stand at the coffeepot and share a cigarette with us in our slippers?

The hard light at noon tells us that we have no shadow self, nothing to be ashamed of, no time in our routine for secret thoughts. There is no turtle heart in the shut shell we pass on the road to Auburn, flickering its nervous pilot light within the impervious casing. All day we move things from one place to another place, cars, memos, forklifts, crates of contracted-for goods, fiestaware for the Hardys, their delicate necks hand-painted in Oaxaca by other “sleepless eremites.” And somewhere in the midst of the afternoon a mist of the pain, the pinch that woke us on the visitor’s couch returns. A quick grimace or unsatisfied yawn emerges. We are ready, even before dark, to enter our dreams again, to shake hands with the ghost perhaps, a dead man with our father’s worsted features, or a woman looking doomed but happy.

And a careless glee enters us, if we let it, if we follow the hint our unguarded yawn let escape, sliding down the winter hill again as children, the wind whipping our faces, the sled edgeless…