346 PART THREE
immense vista: “Pitch glows.” No “I” so far, the scene does without oneself—
though “down valley” and the glow hint at an observer.
On second hearing, more comes to mind. Everything seems still, but the
poet ’s on alert, fire-watching in high summer. Smoke started this poem, maybe
left over from a lightning-struck dead tree. It took smokechasers eighteen hours
to reach one such burn he called in. Pitch glows, so it must be clear, if hazy
down below. Now a voice enters, his own person, “I cannot remember.” The
solitary Zen practicer then dissolves in “Drinking... Looking,” his ongoing
verbs scanning a very present landscape traced in the simplest syllables.
Frugality guides this poem. “It ’s like backpacking. I don’t want anything
that ’s unnecessary.” Think of John Muir roaming Yosemite with blanket, bread,
and cheese. Snyder would rather have no mark after “cities,” but his friends
aren’t “in cities / Drinking cold snow-water.” Far from San Francisco, the poem
ends in silence, clarity, or doesn’t end, as “Looking” drifts “for miles / Through
high still air.” These “plain poems,” he said, “run the risk of invisibility.” They
do “the work of seeing the world withoutany prism of language, and to bring
that seeing intolanguage.” An arc of tension connects words to the world.
All’s not blissful mindlessness in still air. Summer of 1952, Snyder kept a
journal at Crater Mountain lookout, 8,149 feet—icicles frozen upward in July
wind, a few midsummer weeks without snow. “Really wretched weather for
three days now—wind, hail, sleet, snow... hit my head on the lamp, the shut-
ters fall, the radio quits... Outside wind blows, no visibility.” After a week the
weather clears onto three million acres of forest. 28 July his “pressing need” is
“to look within and adjust the mechanism of perception.” That same day sees
a small “dead sharp-shinned hawk, blown by the wind against the lookout.” So
even man’s bare lookout on the world can cause damage. “To write poetry of
nature,” Snyder says, “to articulate the vision,” means a conflict between one
thing and the other:
(reject the human; but the tension of
human events, brutal and tragic, against
a non-human background? Like Jeffers?)The hawk and rock at Crater lookout set him thinking of Robinson Jeffers,
who’d “sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk.” Admiring the
California poet since high school, now he wonders “if, to take as strong a stance
in and around nature as Jeffers does required such an alienated attitude towards
human beings.” One last entry on 28 July: “Pair of eagles soaring over Devil’s
Creek canyon.”
Like Keats at Ambleside Falls thinking of Milton’s Eden, Snyder carries a poet ’s
knapsack. He amused the grizzled firewatchers by hauling in Zen Buddhist