Moore’s America 441“Completing a circle, you have been deceived into thinking you have
progressed.” The octopus on the aerial map is “deceptively reserved and
flat,” but the real one has the “concentric crushing rigor of the python,” and
obeys a vaster geometry than ours. The Indian ponies in the landscape are
“hard to discern” among the birch trees, ferns, lily pads, and other
enumerated flora. Nature may play the prickly host—we are “met by the
polite needles of the larches”—but only to elude us. Maps give us a false
sense of security too. This glacier is an active volcano and produces an
avalanche at the end. Its “reserve” is temporary. Moore is fully aware, in
quoting the promotional rhetoric of the park administration, that nature’s
intention is a human fiction. But our plunder and presumption are more than
matched by its mysterious geologic presence that can alchemically transmute
verdure into onyx, and that displays spruce trees with the eerie legacy of an
American royal family “each like the shadow of the one beside it.” Nature is
continually erasing the images that it projects; the storm “obliterates the
shadows of the fir trees.” Man’s fraudulence turns on itself as he witnesses
miracles he “dare not speak [of] at home for fear of being viewed as an
impostor.”
Moore takes nature off the map, then, but she knows she has put it in
a theater. To remind us of this, a curtain falls at the end of the poem, an
avalanche to image the blank page: “a curtain of powdered snow launched
like a waterfall.” Ultimately this is not a poem about Mt. Rainier. Like other
modernist texts, it is presentational rather than representational, and Mt.
Rainier itself becomes enfolded in the dense fabric of a poem that is about
nothing less than the earth and our institutional and imaginative relationship
to it, enacting rather than describing that relationship. We cannot “know
nature,” in Thoreau’s phrase, except through the kaleidoscope of our
landscapes. Hence the poem is a compilation of quotations and allusions
rather than a first-hand account, like Thoreau’s description of Mt. Katahdin
or Muir’s description of Yosemite. Thoreau’s “Contact! Contact!” like
Emerson’s “original relation to nature” is an elusive ideal, but not just
because of modern development. Man has not ruined nature; nature has
absorbed man. Indeed, humans become part of the “fauna” of the scene at
Mt. Rainier—the mountain guide and the hotel keeper are among the
“diversity of creatures” who make their home in this place. While they and
the tourists they draw are constructing “Mt. Rainier,” then, Mt. Rainier is
encompassing them.
As Patricia Willis and John Slatin have shown, Moore’s poem asks us to
recall Paradise Lostand to acknowledge that we have forfeited that “power
that Adam had,” the power of naming, and of original sight. This allusion has