FIELDWORK on Cornucopia Peak, Looking for Gold! (no luck...) (± 8600 feet)
View over Pine Valley & the community of Halfway . . .
On the road in the American Northwest.
FIELDWORK on Cornucopia Peak, Looking for Gold! (no luck...) (± 8600 feet)
View over Pine Valley & the community of Halfway . . .
On the road in the American Northwest.
FOOL'S PROSPECT—
to the reader . . .
O dear reader, please, you decide . . .
How ought I best spend my days?
Should I be out digging in dark loam for new poems,
or would I be better off looking for tiny specks of gold?
O, how I envy the industrious ant, dragging past me
the dead carcass of another species
very much larger than itself.
What booty! What satisfaction
at work well done!
No doubt, no hesitation there!
Yet here I sit, as I scribble and scratch away
at works fated—when the graces are with me
—to be beautiful, yet so sadly ignored.
And then, as my pan comes up empty again,
with nothing to show for my work today
but cold hands and a sore back,
slowly, I learn to see that all that sounds
right and good on my composing tablet may,
once tested by the Muse's unforgiving hammer of truth,
be but so much more shiny, attractive—
but o-so-easily fractured—
fool's prospect.
Camp Lost & Found,
Eagle Cap Wilderness,
Oregon, IX.1.2008
