ABSTRACT
(A poem in the Romantic manner, written in a state of exhaustion on the Col de Granon) I am too close to heaven here The stars dazzle In the day the sun will press down on my back until it weighs like bars of molten gold The glaring snow will stress my eyes with silver whips Incongruous bells astound my ears in the diminished air Discordant music from the torrent swells and bursts into my head and clamours there Dear God there is no further I can go up these mad mountains I am yet too near and there are warnings like the falling snow that I have tried too hard to conquer fear that I have gone too far into the night too near the singing stars too far away from plain and valley things into the white indifferent peaks that even in the day stare back with glacial malice at the sun Yet they demand I scale them with my pack of heavy sunlight silver stars I shun the white road forward but I can’t go back Last night we were fierce lovers in the snow our passion making tolerable then the hostile cold A thousand feet below we did the same wild thing and that was when my head slipped from your breast and gently fell setting my lips against a smooth hard rock 246What in that moment happened I can’t tell but passion was arrested by the shock —the lust-destroying shock inside my head— to feel the same sensation as I felt when by his coffin he being three days dead I kissed my father’s forehead as I knelt I’ve left you now my snowy lover and I must climb on You are forgotten All I know is that I will not understand until I reach the peak or else I fall and one way or another join the dead who tried to search for fathers in the sun but found that mother ice was there instead and that the mountain claimed them one by one
