Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais

Circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais

By Forrest Gander

 
maculas of light fallen weightless from
pores in the canopy our senses
part of the wheeling life around us and through
an undergrowth stoked with the unseen
go the reverberations of our steps

 as we hike upward mist holds
the butterscotch taste of Jeffrey pine 
to the air until we reach a serpentine
barren, redbud lilac and open sky, a crust
of frost on low-lying clumps of manzanita

at Redwood Creek, two
tandem runners cross
a wooden bridge over
the stream ahead of us the raspy
check check check of a scrub jay

hewing to the Dipsea path while
a plane’s slow groan diminishes bayward,
my sweat-wet shirt going cool
around my torso as another runner
goes by, his cocked arms held too high

Cardiac Hill’s granite boulders appear
freshly sheared Look, you say,
I can see the Farallon Islands there
to the south over those long-backed hills
one behind another a crow honks

the moon still up over Douglas
firs on the climb to Rock Spring yellow
jackets and Painted Lady butterflies
settle on the path where some under-
ground trickle moistens the soil

I predict you’ll keep to the shade of
the laurels to nibble your
three-anchovy-slices-over-cheese
sandwich while I sprawl on a boulder
in full sun sucking a pear

the frass of caterpillars tinkles onto beds of dry
leaves under the oak where a hawk alights
with its retinue of raging crows we are prey to the ache
of not knowing what will be revealed as
the world lunges forward to introduce itself

clusters of tiny green dots, bitter oyster,
line the black stick held in your hand, weak
trees leaning into us as if we were part
of the wet dark that sustains their roots
under dead leaves and that Armillaria

since honey mushrooms suck from
the soil chemicals that trigger a tree’s
defences, they leech the tree’s sap
undetected all the while secreting toxins
to stave off competing species

but in the inseparable
genetic mosaic of their thin
root filaments the identity
of any singular species blurs among inter-
active populations, twice alive

near the summit, a gleaming
slickensides outcrop
sanctifies the path winding
through a precinct of greenschists
whose lethal minerals sterilize the ground

the hum of some large insect
Immelmanning around
our heads calls to mind,
you tell me, the low drone
of a Buddhist chant

but now we really hear chanting
we can’t decode —Don’t
be so rational—a congregate speech
from the redtrembling sprigs, a
vascular language prior to our

breathed language, corporeal, chemical,
drawing our sound into its harmonic, tuning
us to what we’ve not yet seen, the surround
calling us, theory-less, toward an inference
of horizontal connections there at

ground level, an incantation in-
dependent (of us) but detectable, consummate
always resistant (to us) but inciting
our recognition of what it might mean
to be here—  among others human and not—

here, home, where ours is another of the small
voices taking us over, over ourselves
over into the nothing-between, the out
of sight of ourselves, a litany from
spore-bearing mouths as

hyphae stretch their long necks
and open their throats opening
a link between systems
a supersaturation of syntax
an arousal even as slow-

rolling walls of high-decibel
sonar blow out the ears of whales and
fires burn uncontrolled and
slurry pits leak into the creek, etc.
etc., femicides, war, righteous

insistence and still
and still the lived sensation fits
into the living sensorium, can’t
you hear?—Don’t be so
rational—the world inhale?—hear

the call from elsewhere which
is just where we are, no, even
closer, inside us inside the blood-
pulse of our bodies, the bristle of
our mosses, the embrace—, and exhale