Timberline Press, 45 pages, 1995
Out Of Print.
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NEWTON REVISITED
GRAVITY and motion and some thing massed
to go lower, precipitous prescription,
as when I watched a man in El Dorado
Canyon, dressed only in red silk
shorts and tennis shoes, scale
a plunging granite face higher
than any city building. His thigh muscles
finer than braided rope, each spiraling
sinew compounded by another. Ascending
he grew smaller, angelic, and sometimes
swung upside down, reaching blindly out
and up over a ragged ledge, feeling for
a finger-thin crack or feeble shelf
of heaven to grab and hold. He was half
spider climbing a fissured igneous web,
and when he reached the top, fists
of lighting punched through the bellying
clouds, The canyon became a thunderous
well as rain obscured and turned
the mountain into a vertical river.
I waited out the storm in a cave,
considered his survival near naked
on a freezing mountain, his only way
down a slippery escarpment. In the middle
of the downpour, he walked up soaked
and shivering, smiling as he told how
he was unable to see his hands knuckle in
crevices, his wrists buried in the sheering
water, and carried into its current to the bottom
in a flowing firmament, until he stepped
on grounded principles.
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There’s a boldness I love, which perks up the eyes and ears in these days full of indistinguishable detritus from large and small press alike.
Bargen leaves a strong impression. This is from the opening of “No Matter How Hard We Try”:
The wind is really nothing:
a few overheated or under cooled spaces
hyperventilating, pushed this way
or that by a few points of pressure.
Maybe it throws around a little rain
or hail at the edges, and the swizzle
stick of lightning mixes winds itself
up into a coil sucking up chickens
and yachts.
There’s that uncommonly strong imagery that appeals, the layering . But it’s moved and blended, stirred, by skillful enjambment and language choice…
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