From "Zebulon"
The explorer Zebulon M. Pike "discovers" the Colorado peak
later named after him
Pike set out on the hike he must have planned
Since his eye first locked in the far-off peak
Ten days before. Now it was late November
In eighteen-six, a Monday. There was The Peak,
Just to the north, looking so close that Pike
And Miller, who had also gone along
With Pike on his slog toward the high point of a river,
With two more men blithely set out from camp
At one o’clock, “with an idea of arriving
At the foot of the mountain; but found ourselves obliged
To take up our nights lodging under a single
Cedar, which we found on the prairie, without
Water and extremely cold.” Still not convinced
That a mountain could keep on backing off from them,
Pike and his men marched early that Tuesday morning
“With an expectation of ascending the mountain,” but at night
Had to make camp — at, Pike declared, its base.
Wednesday: sure they would climb and descend by evening,
They left their blankets, everything, in camp.
They climbed, sometimes up almost vertical rocks,
Till evening, when they camped in a slit of a cave
On a steep slope. It had a slanting roof
Of reddish granite set with gray-green lichens;
A floor of turbulent rock. They had no blankets,
No food, only the water they got from snow,
Which lay waist-deep — either a better year
For snow than most are now, or Pike’s report
Added some inches. Possibly the depth
Grew in proportion to his hunger and thirst
And to the “inequality of the rocks”
They had lain on. On that Thanksgiving morning
They crawled out groaning, stiff-limbed, with dry throats,
Shivering in the summer uniforms
Their leader’s forethought had supplied them with
For the easy overnight climb he could clearly see,
Just up the way. But here’s the thing that twists
The prism so Pike’s dark blunders come through tinted:
He and his men stood on that wretched morning
To look the way they had come, and felt themselves
“Amply compensated” for their trials
"By the sublimity of the prospects below.
The unbounded prairie was overhung with clouds . . .
Like the ocean in a storm; wave piled on wave
And foaming, whilst the sky was perfectly clear
Where we were.” Such was Pike, such were his men,
Feeding their starved cells on what they had seen
And hoped to see. They turned and went on up,
Steeply again, wasting their dwindling powers
Each time a foot slipped off a coated rock
Or plunged into a crack unseen in the snow,
Eyes on the high foothill Pike called “the summit
Of this chain.” Soon they had a break: a long,
Flat ridge, red-soiled where subalpine wind
Had clawed away the protective scab of snow.
Then up again, pulling from rock to rock
By grabbing the branches of small limber pines,
Scaly and gray like tails of obliging lizards.
On top, out of breath, they saw once more the summit
Of “the Grand Peak, which was entirely bare
Of vegetation and covered with snow.” For once,
Pike overestimated the distance left
To the mountain he had been so confident of climbing.
It was, he said, maybe sixteen miles away,
A day’s march just to the base, “when I believe
No human being could have ascended to
Its pinical.” Did he mean just in those
Conditions, hungry, miserably dressed,
And almost sure of yet more foodless days?
If he meant ever, that was one more time
His foresight was askew. Just fourteen years
From then, on a fine summer day, three men
Walked up, finding no sign that anyone
Had made it there before them. One thing’s sure:
The peak Pike never knew would bear his name
Had conquered him. He called it Great or Grand,
When in fact, he might, in weariness and hunger,
Have written down Unconquerable Peak.
Defier of Gravity
Up is his down, his easy path,
Down his downfall. Death can win him
Through his own gorging, this guest’s custom
When all unbidden he breezes in
And loud, arrogant, eats poor wretches
Out of house and home. But heaped tables,
Meats in abundance, manage no more
To ease his hunger than empty ones,
And dinner over he dies on the spot,
Or unappeased prowls to the neighbors’,
Merry fellow, for more glutting,
Then, dead or alive, leaves his hosts
In the black, bankrupt, brief though his stay was,
A monster, clearly, missed by no one,
His rude arrival rued and lamented.
How different, though, when, duly met,
Calm and engaging, he graces a room,
The loved center of circled talk,
Fed, though not petted, a peerless uniter.
At length, when left, he lingers all night,
Dying, paling, till people stir
And a breathed greeting brings back his smile.
Donald Mace Williams is a retired newspaper writer and editor with a Ph.D. in Beowulfian prosody. His second book of poems, The Nectar Dancer, was published in August 2023 by Stoney Creek Publishers. He lives in Austin. ”From ‘Zebulon'” is an excerpt of a longer blank verse poem on the Pike expedition; ”Defier of Gravity” is an alliterative riddle poem.
Pulsebeat Poetry Journal 