Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

274 PART THREE

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the mountain revealing itself unclouded, its snow

tinged apricot as it looked west

Far but not too far from Marianne Moore ’s octopus Rainier, Levertov sees an
“Animal mountain” of clefts and creases, a “snowwhite foam mirage,” “obdurate,
unconcerned,” sensing too its “slopes of arid scree” and “scarring roads.”
Throughout her chronicle runs a sense that revealed or hidden, massive stone
and snow or ethereal vapor, this everpresent mountain has a more-than-natural
reality. Her own awareness reflects its silent witness to human transience, like
the gazing grain along Dickinson’s path toward eternity. Sometimes,

I forget or refuse to go

down to the shore or a few yards

up the road, on a clear day

so as to see Rainier. Mindful of nature, religion, politics, personhood, Denise
Levertov must go see Rainier

to reconfirm

that witnessing presence.