Setting Sail to Mountains: a breathing exercise

(written on Sail, a Lakeland summit, Feb 2021)

A momentary jettison, firing empties.
Did I imagine you saying that this would be easy?
I make my heart beat faster than is possible. 

*

This poem is an offer of implication.
The scarred path upon this fellside
an erosion of multiples of grief.
 
Down and down and down,
over and over.
 
My blade is a pair of studded
fell-shoes to this fell-ridge limb.
The cliff behind is called The Scar.
That hill ahead Scar Crags.

I silently beg you, Sail,
do not quit your breathing with me. 

*

The snow on Hopegill Head
reflects the purple-reddish early morning
sunshine back to the sky and back again.

Despite myself, I locate my emotions
in this shapely mountain’s name and the gash
which leads its river to the sea.
 
Of course, I will never forget the moment
when I learnt my mother had ceased breathing.
The rush to be there quickly – but for what?
There weren’t tears sufficient to it. 

The river ups its melting game
and delivers us unto the sea.

*

From the summit of Sail
the descending hillside faces slightly north
of east, and my eyes consume the views
with such intensity
that it’s like I am just eyes.

No face. No mouth. No neck. No torso.
And now, no limbs.
The air condenses where my eyes are breathing.
My eyes are overthinking absolutely everything.

(Pink snow frames the
ragged gash of Broad Stand
on the southerly horizon.
Is anybody already out there?)

Grief is not an absence.
It’s a self-explosion-whole-whole-lot-of-mountain
many many pieces. (Pebbles, stones.
My eyes kick the pebbles and the stones.)
It’s an unrequested and unreliable visitor.
It’s in me, and it follows me around when I choose
to travel out of me, as well.

Overthinking’s easier than overfeeling
maybe. 

*

Or perhaps, more simply said.
I miss you.
 
A phrase that’s short enough to be expelled
in a single, simple breath.
Who’re you kidding now?

I read a notification on my phone:
the yellow warning of snow and ice
has just been cancelled. In the next few days, they say,
it’s going to rain.
 
I run into the future and my mother isn’t there,
yet when I speak to her, she answers me. 

*

It wasn’t until I’d thought about silence
on the approach run up the valley
that I noticed the insistent birdsong
and the steady rush of flowing river,
and the swoosh of the road I left behind me
to the ragged rhythm of my breathing
syncopating my tread.

Turns out death is everywhere. (I’d read about
the Halifax bomber that crashed into the face
of the Force Crag cliffside up ahead in 1944
and all three flight-hands died.)
 
Silence. I forget to hear my breathing.
Sworls of frozen ice. Individual tree growths
on the flanks of Grisedale Pike.
(We’re all, more than occasionally,
outgrowths of fell).
The water running off the hillside
stops frozen in the instance of dripping.
 
This valley was known for the mining of baryte.
Feeling of battle.

*

On the night before, I lay my head
upon the bed beside her, and I told her,
everything was going to be ok
and for that moment – only – everything
was only me.

Her reassurance was a heightening pitch
in the distress she experienced breathing.
 
A few months previously she’d asked
me, ‘am I giving what you seek?’
 
A catching of breath.
I break some ice. My attempt to keep my feet dry
at the stepping stones had been futile.

*

So what now?
A solitary female black-faced sheep surveys
the valley and the view of Skiddaw from her
elevated promontory perch,
as if it is her own.  

For a moment,
I’d believed I was the first one here today.
(There’s something so familiar in the way
Skiddaw dominates the turning of
my landscape.) 

But then, the black-faced sheep on the hillside
now behind me and the light-scribbled markings
of some early-bird claws leading briefly up the path ahead
before digressing elsewhere. A slight disturbance
on the settling of windblown snow.
 
I’m wearing someone else’s hat
with someone else’s name-tag sewn
into the inside seam.
Who’s now breathing here, and for whom?

*

If you cannot quite conclude
then it’s best to do so
with the basic law
of the ups and downs of gravity.
To be part of something makes it happen?
Up and down the mountain goes, forever.
 
I’m reminded of the erstwhile art
of scree running.
The trick is to go with it. Lean forward.
Trust your feet, the shifting ground,
the pull of instinct. But the true art resides
in moving lightly. Precisely. Slowly?

How she barely left a trace
and the lack of trace became her.
 
Allowing myself to be unmade
in the process of becoming mountain –
which kind of mountain would you choose
to be – the mountain steals a single breath – 
and vice versa, forever…  

*
 
Yet still -
I take the eroded downhill zig zag
path at speed, remembering the joke I can’t remember
but whose punchline ends with:
‘faster Mummy. Faster, faster, faster.’
 
Turns out, my breath cannot keep up
where my driven body leaves off.
Three steps to an inhalation, two steps out.
The constructed path is solider than scree –
tripping over each and every impact  –
and by the time I reach the bottom
my hands are crying from cold. To speak of joy and despair
as the nearest two emotions. Memories bounce low.

It’s been 7 months and 19 days
and every day, a day I think of you.

In your absence
will the thigh deep heather,
deeply flocked with cotton snow, support my fall?
I take that risk, and begin once more to run,
and submit myself to the simple gravity of breathing.