Scafell
(for Molly Lefebure)
Its lump-of-coal outline stood above us, bent
With shaft upturned to much higher clouds
Defeating us but others too
In line; determined to finish us.
On the day they went up I stayed down and read quietly.
We had conferred on Wordsworth and all
The Lake writers for a week, heard talks
On beauty and on fear, the love that as William
Wrote hath terror in it. And we had fell-walked
Helm Crag in Grasmere, Dungeon Ghyll
And the long way round up Dove Crag
And over Fairfield in total mist.
We got quite lost up there and trusted
A friend with a whistle, map and compass,
A woman of all kinds of tough experience
And two stone-faced Americans, working at their image.
Should we try the big one? No question.
Studies to do, a touch of boredom at the idea
Of a day in the sky, and terror at sheer height...
At school when I was ten they enticed me
Out on a ledge four stories up and only two feet wide.
It was there for embellishment. Scared
Of fear I clambered out and found my spaces.
Cliffs rounding their slippery sheep-cropped grass
Concavely; vertical rock but with a tree
Or broken ledge a few feet down;
A hundred-foot descent but angled away;
None of these troubled. It was the sheer, the absolute of fall
That Scafell shaped, holding in its two hands
And gently juggling and never looking down.
Prudent and sensible (and there are other names)
I did Helvellyn and Castle Cragg but not Scafell.
The man from Dallas who shared the room
Came back that evening and sat before
His sacrarium of lotions, after-shaves, creams,
As stern as all the week. He stroked his chin
Asking if I had read, had a fruitful day.
He'd done Scafell and got the girl he wanted,
'It was easy,' he said. 'You just go up,
Keep away from the crags
And the lunatic climbers on the vertical face.
And yet it's weird, on top... To go up isn't enough.
You want to be it. …be it with grass and goats
And rocks, standing in the sun forever.’
We sat there with our bottled intentions.
Our plans, our gravity, our fall.
Page(s) 74-75
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