I

Stretched out on the ground, I hear the news of the night
Pass over and under:
The faraway honks of geese flying blind as stars
(And hoof—or heartbeats),
The squeaks of bats, impaling moths in the air,
Who leave light wings
To flutter by themselves down to the grass
(And under that grass
The thud and thump of meeting, the weasel's whisper),
Through the crackling thorns
Over creekbeds up the ridge and against the moon,
The coyotes howling
All national anthems, cresting, picking up
Where men leave off
(And, beneath, the rumble of faulted and flawed earth
Shaking its answer).

In “One Ear to the Ground,” the chorale of sound images orchestrates cries of creatures that fly, scurry, flutter, crawl, or burrow, tunneling under the earth's crust, with the rustlings of foliage and brush. The deep, low-pitched voice of the earth itself, maestro and impresario combined, presides over the chorus and provides the solo bass (music of the lowest audible register), the poem's dynamic blend of aural effects beginning and ending at ground zero. David Wagoner's ear is perfectly attuned to all keys of the chromatic scale of ground music. Owing to this supersonic acumen, which distinguishes Wagoner's most current poetic language, his masterful new sequence of backpacker poems—his song of the earth—comprises the most profound and accomplished work of his career to date. In this cycle of nine meditations (which launch the “New Poems” section of Wagoner's Collected Poems, the book's release date synchronized with the author's fiftieth birthday)—naturalistic and metaphysical, at once—Wagoner maps out a topography which earns him the creditable claim of exclusive squatter's rights. It is his own unique stakeout in contemporary writing. Wagoner's lone surveillance of this territory in the American Northwest of the psyche keeps unearthing fresh resources in the land. It proves to be a forestscape fully equal to his lavish talents, a locale proportionately challenging to his substantial lyric and contemplative gifts.

In his last three volumes (Riverbed, Sleeping in the Woods, and “New Poems” in the Collected), Wagoner has, characteristically, taken a poised stance at the bewitched thresholds between interiors and exteriors:

“Doors”

All over town at the first rattle of night
The doors go shut,
Flat hasp over iron staple, bolt into strike,
Or latch into groove;
And locked and double-locked and burglar-chained,
All of them wait
For the worst, or for morning, steady in their frames:
From hinge to lock stile,
From hard head-casing down to the plinth block
The doors hang still,
One side for knocking and one for hiding away,
One side for love
And one for crying out loud in the long night
To the pounding heart.

Wagoner deciphering life-signals at the charmed doorsill, the window frame (indoors vs. outdoors), the city limits, the magical earth itself (aboveground vs. below). Wagoner listening, with “one ear to the ground,” to subterranean chase for survival, the scuttle of hunter and hunted, the cold speech of the earth. Wagoner discovering that the mole's death-shriek is one heartbeat away from his own early-warning-system previsions and forebodings of death: the rapid-fire heart palpitations that fling him down panting and gasping for breath on the fairway of the golf course (“Tachycardia at the Foot of the Fifth Green”); Wagoner himself a human equivalent to the salmon washed ashore in “The Survivor,” its precarious life or death subject to a chance flick of Wagoner's boot, freeing the puzzled creature—fallen quirkily out of its element—from ripples of the hopeless shallows (“we saw its humpback writhe ashore, then tilt / upright in an inch of water”), sending it back into the saving flow of the downstream currents. A strong kinship between humans and fellow creatures is evoked, recurrently, by scenes in which mortal and bestial frailties are juxtaposed, as in the remarkable poem “In the Open Season”: the human lovers find themselves unexpectedly sharing victimization with wild animals as targets for the hordes of hunters swarming near their carelessly selected campsite. Their only recourse against the cacophony of the guns is to bed down on the earth's matted “duff,” their love cries of copulation fending off, or counter-balancing, the symphony of discords—an odd mixture of gun blasts, animal squeals, thrashings and flailings in the brush, the terror sounds sizzling and ripping through the air all about them:

                                        … blue and ruffed grouse
Went booming and rocketing slapdash deep under the branches
Beside us, beating our hearts, and the guns began slamming
Their blunt, uninterrupted echoes from valley to valley.
We zigzagged up through the stunted hemlocks, over stumps and snow
Into shale, into light, to a ridgecrest frozen hard as a backbone
And lying down as if breathing our last, caught the air
One burst at a time. When the world came back, we looked
At dozens of miles of it crumbling away from us
Where bears and deer were spilling out of hiding.
The overlapping thumps of shotgun and rifle
Froze us around each other out of the wind …

II

The new sequence of poems, though it draws on many of the same virtues of style and imagination as in the earlier works, offers a remarkably expanded breadth of vision. As in Theodore Roethke's great North American Sequence, Wagoner's cycle of backpacker poems achieves a poised surveillance of three worlds at once: the citizen-naturalist of America's Northwest, the creative artist, and the passionate lover of fauna, flora—and woman. The poems are obsessed, chiefly, with questions of survival—in the woods, in love, and in the art of the poem. Three worlds—no fewer—resonate in all the best images. And yet, Wagoner's advanced style is so level-spoken, so gentle and even-toned, it is baffling for a reader to try to account for its power to bear up under so much wealth of human reference and density of overtones. Somehow the phrasing is well ventilated with no loss of tautness in the line. A remarkable complexity and versatility of syntax dynamically accentuates shifts in rhythm. The resultant effect, unlike anything I have encountered in American poetry, is that of an apparently low-keyed, spare lyricism, of moderate emotional intensity which gathers force and verve from a steady build-up of pitch accruing from the perfect control of nuances and overtones over a wide stretch of purely hypnotic, clean writing. In some passages, the stylistic blend is so transparent in its radiance, its discharge of energetic intelligence, that Wagoner's unwavering assurance of voice may be misperceived by readers as mere fluency or glib facility.

In “Breaking Camp,” the short introductory poem of the cycle, we are implicitly forewarned not to read the sequence narrowly as a metaphor for the creative process, but to see symbolized in the backpacker's adventures and travels a graph of Wagoner's entire life-odyssey, his aging process a cyclic traveling, punctuated by vivid, life-giving returns to his first self:

Having spent a hard-earned sleep, you must break camp in the
          mountains
At the break of day, pulling up stakes and packing,
Scattering your ashes,
And burying everything human you can’t carry. Lifting
Your world now on your shoulders, you should turn
To look back once
At a place as welcoming to a later dead-tired stranger
As it was to your eyes only the other evening,
As the place you’ve never seen
But must hope for now at the end of a day's rough journey:
You must head for another campsite, maybe no nearer
Wherever you’re going
Than where you’ve already been, but deeply, starkly appealing
Like a lost home, with water, the wind lying down
On a stretch of level earth,
And the makings of a fire to flicker against the night
Which you, travelling light, can’t bring along
But must always search for.

Wagoner finds, as he edges past mid-career, that very nearly all the human riches and poetic resources he had ever prized have survived the wear of years with minimal slippage. While he has cultivated a clear-sighted rigor in owning up to losses (“burying everything human you can’t carry”), he is finding that there is precious little of value that has not been frugally salvaged. There are few ashes to scatter, no squandered human means, gifts, to be written off and buried behind him. Facing into the cold winds of middle life and beyond, Wagoner has armed himself with the backpacker's code of “travelling light,” “lifting / your world now on your shoulders.” And this creed will suffice. It is a lean style he now writes, carrying little, if any, excess freightage. This poetry is pervaded with the tenor of buoyancy, a floating grace of movement. The verse measure oscillates periodically: in form, it approximates a sine wave pattern, but the apparent regularity of movement is merely typographic, not rhythmic. Wagoner adroitly modulates the musical cadences of his verse paragraph, his rhythms never falling into a deadening consistency, though his craftsmanship might be mistaken for run-of-the-mill conventionality by careless or hasty readers. In recent work, Wagoner's language has grown less ornate, shorn of the word-play and surface flashiness that many admirers of his earlier work may have come to regard as a welcome trademark of his personal style. But if they take pains to get in step with his new pacing, a momentum which often may sacrifice verbal pungency to luminous thought, a continuity of rhythmic sweep, and a purity of tonal pitch held taut from first line to last, they will find ample new rewards. In the most stirring passages, the powerful spell over a reader's ear is such that the lines seem to glide, or drift, weightlessly on Wagoner's breath like flotsam on a wave crest.

III

The weakest poem in the sequence, “Meeting a Bear,” fails largely because it lacks the true sense of drama:

If you haven’t made noise enough to warn him, singing, shouting,
Or thumping sticks against trees as you walk in the woods,
Giving him time to vanish
(As he wants to) quietly sideways through the nearest thicket,
You may wind up standing face to face with a bear.
Your near future,
Even your distant future, may depend on how he feels
Looking at you, on what he makes of you
And your upright posture
Which, in his world, like a down-swayed head and humped shoulders,
Is a standing offer to fight for territory
And a mate to go with it.

A reader is perhaps too demanding in his expectations, given the wealth of bear portraits in our literature, ranging from Faulkner's totemic projection of the demon of primeval America (half flesh-and-blood mammoth, half phantasm) to Galway Kinnell's hunter magically transfigured into the bear he hunts. Since Wagoner clearly establishes a metaphysical rhetoric as the prevailing discursive undertone, a reader does not anticipate either a strong narrative line or lurid naturalistic detail of raw encounter between man and beast, but he could well wish for a few select items of brute physiognomy to at least suggest the palpable actuality of bear—a few deft strokes, say, like those skillfully abbreviating the anatomies of the killer whale in Wagoner's earlier poem, “The Keepers” (“heaved and lapped by its own backwash. / I couldn’t have closed my arms around its head … Its mouth a foot below / as wide as a window”), or the rattlesnakes in “Snake Hunt” (“pale bellies looping out of darker diamonds / in the shredded sunlight, dropping into his sack … Like the disembodied muscles of a torso …”). The poem begins on its strongest nuance, a graphic snapshot of the bear's unique style of locomotion, his near-invisible “sideways” departure that almost perfectly blends with the surrounding foliage, recalling Faulkner's spectre-bear. The poem returns to the crisp, vigorous language of this passage only once again, as the trapped persona is admonished to escape the bear by simulating his body-moves:

But if you must make a stir, do everything sidelong,
Gently and naturally,
Vaguely oblique. Withdraw without turning …

For the most part, however, the poem is written in feeble, essayistic language, its meter slackened, the over-civilized voice of the author-as-seer intruding as it explains the bear's psychology:

He won’t enjoy your smell
Or anything else about you, including your ancestors
Or the shape of your snout. If the feeling's mutual,
It’s still out of balance:
He doesn’t care what you think or calculate; your disapproval
Leaves him as cold as the opinions of salmon.

There is a false note here—Wagoner posturing as social commentator; his fixed, unyielding attitude toward events manipulates the poem's action and forcibly leads its language. In the remaining poems of this otherwise superb sequence, the natural events lead the reticent will of the speaker, his tacit reverie and contemplative flux of ideas unfolding, haltingly, from the succession of moves across a landscape—terrestrial and cosmological, at once—with a sparkling inevitability.

IV

“Walking in a Swamp” is the pacesetter for the remaining seven poems of the sequence. Tracing the stages of inextricable entrapment in a swamp, the poem explores new modes of staying afloat and “means of moving”—while reclining—for survival:

When you first feel the ground under your feet
Going soft and uncertain,
It’s best to start running as fast as you can slog
Even though falling
Forward on your knees and lunging like a cripple.

The protagonist finds he has been crippled—to struggle to walk, or even to remain “upright,” is to sink and drown. In short, to cling, regressively, to the most fundamental definition of a man—the upright biped—is to die. His very species, as it has been envisaged since the caveman's wall murals, is challenged, gainsaid, negated. The most rudimentary questions of how to be a man, how to function as a man-organism, must be reassessed, relearned:

But if you’re caught standing
In deep mud, unable to walk or stagger,
It’s time to reconsider
Your favorite postures, textures, and means of moving,
Coming to even terms
With the kind of dirt that won’t take no for an answer.

Dirt. Man's fraternal earthmate, the submissive partner in his life travels, ungrudging ally, always heretofore the one “that takes without question whatever comes its way,” has suddenly grown waspish, unconciliatory. There is no way to modify, or become divorced from, the inhospitable morass that has chosen him (“the ground under your feet / going soft and uncertain”). To survive, he must set about to radically alter his own inborn physiology. Wagoner's empirical reconstructionism tackles, equivalently, lifestyle and art mode. The pilgrim woodsman will have to endure many trial efforts of clumsiness, ungainly moves and awkward missteps, like any half-crippled victim training his body to compensate for the malfunction. Slowly he develops an entire new set of routines, improvising novel habits of mobility to fit the countless new small emergencies forced upon him by the uncivil environment. “Coming to even terms” with this misanthropic dirt requires an austere self-training, the re-styling of sensory impulse and response to stimuli, a program of exercises and minigymnastic feats that could eventuate in a reconstituting of the human creature's central nervous system.

In subsequent poems of the sequence, a variety of distinct human crises lead to this common solution—the rigorous fostering in the persona's sensibility and physiology of new modes of expression, the adventure of self-renewal carried to such exhaustive limits as to feel like a rebirth. But the new vision of himself, following the violent shake-up and dissolution of his patterned response, has a surprising familiarity about it. It seems as if, in forging ahead, he has accidentally found his way back to a much older state of his own being. Perhaps the original moment of pure awakening to full consciousness has been restored—a primal condition salvaged from childhood in all its “first wildness,” but now coupled with a mature guiding intelligence:

                                                            … searching
Among this second growth of your own nature
For its first wildness …

In other poems, the triggering misadventure, or catalyst to the “second growth,” ranges from a bullet wound (“Being Shot”), to being lost in the woods (“Missing the Trail”), being perplexed by mirages in search of hills (“From Here to There”), falling helplessly under the spell of an enchanted garden (“Waiting in a Rain Forest”), and voyaging deeply into trackless, snow-buried hinterland (“Travelling Light”).

“Walking in the Swamp” is the first poem in the sequence to decisively break new ground in its experimental language. In this compact lyric, though Wagoner shies away from the more glamorous pyrotechnics of his popular early style (“The March of Coxey's Army,” “The Apotheosis of the Garbagemen”), he explores an exuberant vocabulary of sensory excitation which superbly enhances the new body language of the protagonist:

You must lie down now,
Like it or not: if you’re in it up to your thighs,
Be seated gently.
Lie back, open your arms, and dream of floating
In a sweet backwater.
Slowly your sunken feet will rise together,
And you may slither
Spread-ottered casually backwards out of trouble.

“Slither / spread-ottered” hits exactly the right note, the moment of finding the language—musculo-skeletal, as well as literary—of survival, the lexicon of rescue. The cumulative sound-effects of this poem have accrued over an exquisite build-up of verbals with approximate similarity of music, but widely differing meanings, the action-words searching out the new “means of moving,” the new “postures, textures” of body expressiveness that survival of the crisis demands:

[slog/lunging/scampering/bogged down/stagger/slither/swivel/wallow]

Though all verbals in the chain except “slither” represent failed tries to engineer a locomotion of escape, the versatility in the poet's aural range mirrors—and resonates with—the persona's trials and tests, the risks and possibilities of stretching his musculature. The poet has found a sinewy body-language of daring athleticism, the many near-to-right words falling a shade to one side or the other of the precise nuance, circling the moment of truth, and shoring up—at last—the exactly apt phrasing to give it voice, a process of narrowing and keen selection expertly controlled by successive approximations, modulated and evoked by half-tones, like a guitarist tuning the strings of his instrument.

Survival, in this primitive barrens, requires that a man dredge up lost or forgotten animal skills, supersensory acumen that he can recover by traveling backward across the evolutionary chain in his psyche to disinter his animal forbears, re-living his kinship with the snake and the otter (“slither / spread-ottered”), borrowing their specialized expertise. And Wagoner does not stop there, but escorts us further back in time to the earliest links in the life cycle, when the first unicellular animalcules and plantlets were conceived out of the muck. He suggests that we can retrieve our “first wildness” by resuming our shared familial linkage with the muck. To keep from sinking and drowning in muck, one must dig up the hidden muck in the human. To recognize the swamp's survival in us is the key to our survival in the swamp:

If you stay vertical
And, worse, imagine you’re in a fearful struggle,
Trying to swivel
One stuck leg at a time, keeping your body
Above it all,
Immaculate, you’ll sink in even deeper,
Becoming an object lesson
For those who wallow after you through the mire,
In which case you should know
For near-future reference: muck is one part water,
One part what-have-you,
Including yourself, now in it over your head,
As upright as ever.

We note the correspondence between syllabic overtones and the poet's implicit metaphysics, as registered in the reader's ear by the successful warring of potent, monosyllabic whole-earth-thuds [swamp/mud/dirt/mire/muck] against frail, intangible, brain-bred polysyllabic man-blips [stay vertical/above it all/immaculate/upright], and the consequent orchestral vanquishing of the synthetic head verbiage by the indigenous ground music. The cold speech of the earth.

V

In “Tracking,” Wagoner departs from the customary passivity of his persona, who now becomes the aggressor, a hunter tracking an unknown human quarry. As in Henry James's magnificent story, “The Jolly Corner,” the psychology of the hunt is an unspoken collaboration, or partnership, between hunter and hunted. The one role complements and elucidates the other. The strategy of pursuer is the obverse of the pursued. Briefing, or self-training, in either role is apt discipline for its counter-role, which perhaps explains Wagoner's adopting the unlikely stance of huntsman in “Tracking.” For hunter or hunted, pursuer or fugitive, the moment of recognized onset of the hunt miraculously sharpens attention—the powers of concentration are heightened, focused on minutest detail of the natural environment. In “Tracking,” the drama of survival—the single man's life-death struggle, matching his civilized wits against the uncivilized forest—is complicated by a power struggle between two human antagonists.

In “Walking in a Swamp,” the persona was forced to evolve a new system of instant reflexes, to discover secrets of his joints, bone levers and nerve endings ordinarily unlocked only by great athletes after years of training, to enable him to cope with a forbidding natural habitat. In “Tracking,” too, the chief preoccupation is the extemporizing of a new language to cope with unanticipated rigors of physical survival, but this time the perils that menace life are human in origin, not issuing directly from the natural environs. Once again, however, the necessity to find a new language of sensory response is absolute, and requires a similar jolting of the persona's sensibility, a series of shocks to his nervous system that initiate a process of re-learning in his nerve endings and sense organs. In the battle of wills between hunter and hunted, the land itself becomes a neutral intermediary, neither enemy nor ally to either party in the hunt. But this poem's special crisis and distinctive habitat (“this empty country”) demands a more sensitive and delicate new body-intelligence in the persona, coupled with an intricate and exquisitely wrought diction to mirror the new body-language. The tracker must cultivate a new consciousness in his senses to detect minimal shifts and alterations in a low-keyed, even-toned monochromatic landscape. The man whose body can learn to become intimately attuned to fine shades of nuance in the bleak terrain will be equipped to outwit his opponent.

He enters into a close communion with the territory, as if mated to the landscape. He comes to know every patch of this special geography as well as he might know the delicate slopes, valleys, contours, hollows of his lover's naked flesh. The knack he develops for detecting any traces of human or animal movements, maneuvers that have disrupted the “natural disorder” of the landscape, is a power akin to that of learning to read a profoundly difficult foreign language, a language not remotely akin to his native tongue. He develops the paramount art of the woodsman, the hunter, the tracker—the discipline and art of readership:

                                                            … in this empty country
You must learn to read
What you’ve never read before: the minute language
Of moss and lichen,
The signals of bent grass, the speech of sand,
The gestures of dust.

“Tracking” evolves through several distinct clusters of language, differing vocabularies of interrelation between the protagonists—huntsman and victim—and their shared landscape. The central vocabulary, or phrase-cluster, is the lingo of tracker expertise. The passage quoted above is a good compendium of the language of expert tracking. Self-schooling in the logistics of the hunt entails mastering the alphabets of the lay of the land, the vocabulary of earth dialects. “In this empty country,” a treeless and bushless terrain, all key signs of ground lingo occur at ankle level and below. The tracker must investigate and decode clues in ground-cover foliage (moss, lichen, grass), closely inspecting, as well, the surface of the barren topsoil itself (sand, dust).

A second vocabulary, with which the poem begins, is a bunching of the language of laxity, heedlessness, expressed by the undisciplined moves of the traveler who, at first, does not guess that he is being tracked by another:

The man ahead wasn’t expecting you
To follow: he was careless,
At first, dislodging stones, not burying ashes,
Forgetting his heelmarks,
Lighting his fires by night to be seen for miles,
Breaking dead silence.
But he’s grown wary now …

[dislodging/not burying/forgetting/lighting fires/breaking dead silence]

A third vocabulary groups the language of trickery and concealment, a language of failed attempts to fool an expert tracker:

No man can move two feet from where he is,
Lightfooted or lame,
Without disturbing the natural disorder
Under him always,
And no sly sweeping with branches, no bootless dodging,
No shifting to hardpan,
Not even long excursions across bedrock
Should trick your attention.

[lightfooted/sly sweeping/bootless dodging/shifting to hardpan/excursions across bedrock/trick your attention]

A fourth, and final, vocabulary is the phrase-grouping of masterful detective sleuthing, which extends and completes the language of tracking expertise illustrated earlier:

And so, at dogged last,
If you’ve shuffled off the deliberate evasions
And not been sidetracked,
Have followed even blind trails, cutting for sign
Through slides and washouts …
                                                            … your dead-set face …

[dogged last/shuffled off evasions/not sidetracked/followed blind trails/slides/washouts/dead-set face]

The dramatic contest between the two men provides the narrative logic and pretext for the poem's successive development of an existential diction of survival tactics. But these clusters of language evoke the solitary nuance of sequential phases in only one man's private struggle to wrest a living from an extremely primitive environment. The poem's true drama curiously appears to devolve around collisions between the successive blocks of language clusters, rather than centering in any actual human encounter between the two characters, who gradually merge, it would seem, into two antithetical sides of the same man, deepening the parallel I drew earlier to James's story, “The Jolly Corner.” As in the later poem in the sequence, “Being Shot,” the two men are doubles, the man hunted a disguised fantasy-projection out of the psyche of the hunter in “Tracking,” and vice versa in “Being Shot,” a second doubles-fantasy poem complementary to the first.

The doubles genre serves multiple functions in both poems. The implicit relationship between antagonists, two men who have never met, intensifies the reader's absorption in the story—the human-interest level, however superficial at first reading, is arresting in itself, a narrative dimension which fails absolutely in “Meeting a Bear.” The conflict between the men, though they be disguised warring factions of the same personality, provides the occasion and impetus for exploring supplementary dimensions of language, widening the range of stylistic resources, since any kind of relation between humans invites verbal resonances not afforded by a diction strictly confined to the lone backpacker's struggle in the wilds. Finally, it is entirely feasible for a man several days lost in the woods to fantasize, and even hallucinate, about a human enemy—a trick the subconscious mind plays on the cognitive intelligence as a kind of shock therapy to scare up surplus, or residual, psychic energies, and thereby to extend the lost travelers's powers of endurance, whereas he might otherwise have sunken into a malaise of premature exhaustion and defeat.

Both doubles poems conclude with an encounter between hunter and victim that is tinged with a wry humor which intriguingly contradicts, or belies, the tone of tragic entrapment:

(1)          You should be prepared for that unwelcome meeting:
The other, staring
Back to see who’s made this much of his footprints,
To study your dead-set face
And find out whether you mean to kill him, join him,
Or simply to blunder past.

(conclusion of “Tracking”)

The strange play of irony about these lines, evoking quixotic ambiguities, underscores the element of unreality in the victim, who, like a mirage-like figure in a dream, dissolves in smoke mists when approached too closely. The poem's drama halts with a significant thud of vague finality—“or simply to blunder past.” What else is there to do? One cannot seize a phantom by the throat. How can the hunter go on believing in the reality of a victim who vanishes at close range? How, indeed, continue to give credence to his own identity as hunter?

(2)          … seeing things
In a new light
Which doesn’t come from the sky but from all loose ends
Of all your hopes, your dissolving endeavors
To keep close track
Of who you are, and where you had started from, and why
You were walking in the woods before this stranger
(Who is leaning over you
Now with a disarming smile) interfered so harshly.
Not wishing to make yourself conspicuous
By your endless absence
And having meant no harm by moving quietly, searching
Among this second growth of your own nature
For its first wildness.
You may offer him your empty hands, now red as his hat,
And he may grant mercy or, on the other hand,
Give you as gracefully
As time permits, as lack of witnesses will allow
Or your punctured integrity will stand for,
A graceful coup de grace.

(conclusion of “Being Shot”)

“Being Shot” is a poem of Kafkaesque disorientation, a nightmare vision in which the victim's debonair acceptance and absurd civility to the murderer intensify the dream's credibility and terror. To be wounded by a bullet—perhaps fatally—is to enter a foreign territory, another unfamiliar and uncharted landscape. And once again, the expert traveler starts right in to discover the lay of the new land, so to speak, first noticing—with a degree of concentration and sensitivity much more intense than was possible before: his powers of observation have multiplied breathtakingly—the actual forest floor beneath his fallen body. Then gradually he discerns and colonizes the newly discovered topography of his body, slowly succumbing to each of the inevitable symptoms of shock:

And if you haven’t fallen involuntarily, you may
Volunteer now and find what ease waits here
On the forest floor,
The duff of sword fern and sorrel, of spike moss and beadruby
That takes without question whatever comes its way,
While you begin to study
At first hand now the symptoms of shock: the erratic heartbeat,
The unexpected displeasure of half-breathing,
The coming of the cold,
The tendency to forget exactly why you’re sprawling somewhere
That has slipped your mind for a moment, seeing things
In a new light …

As in “Missing the Trail,” the new light comes from an inescapable void in the psyche that forces the traveler to get newly in touch with the self, the seat of his being, if he is to survive in consciousness at all. Everything within, everything without—both worlds are seen in the “new light.” The old light has vanished, put out by a killing shot.

VI

In “Missing the Trail,” the persona discovers that all trails followed, all roads taken, are uncertain and arbitrary, whereas the violent shake-up of finding oneself trailless, lost in “the middle of nowhere,” is the beginning of true self-awareness:

Only a moment ago you were thinking of something
Different, the sky or yesterday or the wind,
But suddenly it’s yourself
Alone, strictly alone, having taken a wrong turn
Somewhere behind you, having missed the trail,
Bewildered, now uncertain
Whether to turn back, bear left or right, or flounder ahead
Stubbornly, breaking new ground out of pride or panic,
Or to raise your voice
Out of fear that screaming is the only universal language.
If you come to your senses, all six, taking your time,
The spot where you’re standing
Is your best hope. …

The full coming “to your senses, all six,” is the recovery from half-being, half-awakeness. The woodsman has been lost, perhaps unknowingly, for much of his life. Thus, when he awakens to this unmistakable palpability of finding himself lost in the woods, it accidentally triggers in him an awareness of the pervasive disjunction of his whole sensibility. His being is out of step, out of touch with his body, and consequently out of touch with the earth, with Nature. This full recognition of dividedness is a locale on the self's map, the site where everything is beginning again (“the spot where you’re standing / is your best hope …”).

The persona of “From Here to There,” in his rage to connect with “the reality,” subjects even his senses to scrutiny and ridicule. His flawed sense-organs threaten to trip him at every step. Moreover, as he travels “from here to there,” every medium or element that fills the space between himself and the place viewed “in the distance” is held suspect:

Though you can see in the distance, outlined precisely
With speechless clarity, the place you must go,
The problem remains
Judging how far away you are and getting there safely.
Distant objects often seem close at hand
When looked at grimly,
But between you and those broken hills (so sharply in focus
You have to believe in them with all your senses)
Lies a host of mirages.

The pilgrim backpacker's training, his program of stern self-discipline, is extended to the befuddling and complex schematics—an exact science, it would seem—of mirages. He grapples with the vast, elusive continuum, ranging from optical illusion to hallucination, and pursues these phantoms with scientist’s unfailing objectivity and skepticism. He trains his keen eye, augmented by a clairvoyant mind's-eye, upon all the disguises reality wears.

What can we trust, if anything, to lead us safely from one indispensable place in our lives to another, “from here to there”? The poem, in addressing itself to this central question, tangentially explores a number of searching questions of epistemology. What is the nature of air, light, and earth, as they can be known and experienced directly by human senses? What are the validity and limits of such information about the world of nature as reaches us via our senses, the messages and data having been relayed to our sense receptors by such more or less reliable intermediaries as water, air, etc.? Provisionally, the speaker elects to trust his senses, though he finds that they grow less reliable to the degree that they are separated from the object by mediators which intercept the raw data transmitted by the object, and thereby filter, refine, dilute, or otherwise distort the information en route to our senses. Since habitually he has surmised in good faith that air, water, and light are neutral and non-interfering mediators (allowing for the usual margin of error compatible with routine or median daily experience), it comes as a great shock to his nervous system to acquire, passively, the following wisdom:

Passing through too much air,
Light shifts, fidgets, and veers in ways clearly beyond you,
Confusing its weights and measures with your own
Which are far simpler …

One by one, the common elements he’d complacently depended upon to tell him the truth about his world are exposed as a gallery of necromancers, frauds: subverted from their role as his faithful counselors, all participate in a confederacy of treason, turning his own senses into defecting agents in the service of his enemy—the mirage:

… between you and those broken hills (so sharply in focus
You have to believe in them with all your senses)
Lies a host of mirages:
Water put out like fire, the shimmer of flying islands,
The unbalancing act of mountains upside down.

Water, fire, air, light, and the land itself—whether it masquerades as “flying islands” or “mountains upside down”—are in league to deceive his senses. How, then, in such a topsy-turvy landscape, can he continue to believe in, or with, his senses to guide him? One by one, each in its turn, he reassesses his sense organs, eliminating from his trust those which cannot provide him with unmediated passage to the reality he seeks, “the Land Behind the Wind”: sight, smell, hearing are suspect, since each of these senses invites deceptive mediation—all are hopelessly vulnerable to the mirages. Only immediate contact will suffice as a safeguard against nature's legions of disembodied spectres. The sense of touch is the one unimpeachable and incorruptible counselor:

A man on foot can suffer only one guiding principle
Next to his shadow: One Damn Thing After Another,
Meaning his substance
In the shape of his footsoles against the unyielding ground.

At last the scrupulous woodsman, following many amputations and reductions, is ready to “come to even terms” with bedrock reality. Likewise, the writer lurking within the backpacker persona, having stripped away all expendable ornaments and excesses of his style, and having disciplined and honed down the tools of his craft, is now ready to wield the sharp cutting edge of his blade of vision to finding imperishably solid poetic terms, and to shore up the architecture of his vision with this irreducible language of substance. He can trust only naked quantities, materiality, flat, hard surfaces—body surface planted squarely on earth surface, flesh and bone pressing the land:

                                                            … his substance
In the shape of his footsoles against the unyielding ground.

Not even all touch receptors are to be trusted implicitly, nor is all ground above suspicion. Naked footsoles are the one flat patch of bare anatomy which receives incontrovertibly valid data from the earth beneath. Seemingly, too, firm ground must be tested until it is proven solid through and through, lest it collapse under his life-risking, life-bearing step:

When you take a step, whatever you ask to bear you
Is bearing your life:
Sound earth may rest on hollow earth, and stones too solid
To budge in one direction may be ready
To gather no moss
With you, end over end, in another. You’ve been foolhardy
Enough already to make this slewfooted journey …

“Slewfooted” is the pivotal word, remarkably fusing the potential fallibilities of the human foot and the earth. This word operates as a hinge in the poem between two shelves of language, and once again the center of gravity—the main thrust—of a poem's drama shifts from the narrative overlay (the semblance of a dynamic story-line) to the lyric conflict between vocabularies tugging and straining toward opposite poles.

The language of substance, of materiality, is pitted against the language of the mirage, of incorporeality. The first cluster is prompted by the persona's full recognition of his self's anchorage, and his being's center, in his senses. But all of his senses gravitate downward, earthward, converging finally in his body's mass, the give-and-take exchanges between his full bulk and the earth under each step he takes:

[weights and measures/substance/shape of his footsoles/unyielding ground/sound earth/stones too solid to budge/rap knuckles against the reality]

This language bunching is rivaled by a second cluster which emerges toward the end of the poem, triggered by the cue phrases “watching your step, having shrugged off most illusions”: the persona then recounts, or rehearses, the language of illusiveness, partly to reassure himself that he has in fact mastered the pitfalls of the mirage, but mainly for catharsis, to purge out of his sensorium any last residues of susceptibility to the demons and spectres that might trip him up, impede his vision, and throw him off the straight and narrow course to reality:

[light shifts, fidgets, and veers/through thick and thin air/dumb shows of light/cloud-stuff/flimsy mock-up/world spun out of vapor]

This is a heavy cargo of mirage verbiage, and a reader is almost physically dizzied by it, learning that it is indeed a long and exacting vigil to maintain—as this writer does—a clear-sighted, unshakable pursuit of bedrock reality in a universe wholly permeated and shrouded with cobwebbiness. But we feel that the strength of the poet's restraint and skepticism triumphs at the finish. His humble plea to continue to be a learner and struggler in the blind wilds is wholly authentic and persuasive. Unconditional belief in the reliability of his senses, which launched this poem, has been tempered indeed (“an infirm believer”), but his singleness of purpose is as steadfast as ever:

                                                            … your hope should be,
As a hardened traveller,
Not to see your trembling hands passing through cloud-stuff,
Some flimsy mock-up of a world spun out of vapor,
But to find yourself
In the Land Behind the Wind where nothing is the matter
But you, brought to your knees, an infirm believer
Asking one more lesson.

His faith shaken, the “man on foot” has sunk to his knees, but he finds perhaps more honor and strength in the acknowledged infirmity than a proud self-assurance could ever afford. It is the burden and complexity of his whole past life assimilated and swept up into the voice of the dynamic present moment that he shoulders, all gracefully folded and tucked into his one lightweight backpack, whether he stands erect, upright biped on his two flat footsoles, or sinks to his knees in prayer:

When you take a step, whatever you ask to bear you
Is bearing your life …

Wagoner's calm authority in these lines is a serenity of earned arrival, a power to face the future and the reality of death with undiminished bravery, conserving and bearing up under his full human and artistic allotment in every step.

VII

The natural marvels of the rain forest, a unique locale, project an instant metaphor. The special idiosyncrasy of the region awakens the visitor/guest to a dream-life native to the habitat. The rain forest is a country in its own right, shielded by its own low ceiling of treetops (“a green sky”). It imposes a tariff, a duty, on the traveler, the immigrant-sojourner who punctures its territorial borders and would seek refuge in its salubrious retreat. To be eligible for passport to this land, he must achieve in himself—the tariff on his corpus—utmost metabolism of passivity, but not vague drift of mind, diminution of wits, or dilution of consciousness—not absence! Rather, he must cultivate a heightened presence of mind in leisureliness, a peace of body which accompanies—indeed, fosters—total alertness, a state of intensified consciousness. His body must be actively vulnerable in stillness: the being of prolonged incubation, a temperament of limitless receptivity, will then fertilize in him new dawnings of consciousness. Then he will see and know, as with his mind's eye, the very rare light which is a by-product of the rain forest's unique interplay of shade and refracted sun-rays filtering through the dense, high overhead foliage. The forest and the earth, acting in concert, will offer the voyager a healing umbrage of a quality he has never before encountered.

For him to lie down, trustingly, in this fructifying darkness compounded of magical half-light, a light so refined by many-layered leaf overlappings and branch intertwinings that its eerie glow seems supernatural, shall be for him to assume the splendid, mystifying identity of a “fallen nurse-log,” which both remains itself and slowly transforms into a fantastic nursery harboring and nurturing a countless variety of other lives, moving into his flesh, finding and sharing his one life in parasitic or symbiotic weddings not unlike the lichen's symbiotic coupling of fungus and alga. His body shall move from a keener grasp of its own singleness, its aloneness, than it has ever achieved before into a recognition of the blessed state whereby a human corpus becomes “a wild garden” in which a variety of other lives may take root. His body, “a fallen nurse-log,” shall convert into a botanical municipality providing free and equal interchange of tissue fluids between all plant species and itself; his body, with the help of the healing moss-catalyst (“moss mending your ways”), idly burgeoning into a remarkable new phase of its biological health, reaching backward across the evolutionary chain to claim its kinship with the family of plants.

Not altogether surprising in a poet who, in other recent poems, registers an anguish over the deaths of trees as excruciating as the pain of loss a reader might expect to be prompted only by slaughter of other humans dear to the writer. (I refer, principally, to the splendid trio of poems which impugn the maniacal squandering and decimation of “three square miles” of a forest of fir trees by so-called selective loggers in the employ of the ubiquitous Weyerhauser Company.) I can think of no other contemporary poet who so readily experiences an intense and authentic fellow feeling for trees: who finds, while reclining on the matted duff of the forest floor for refreshment, travel-wearied, that he can “taste the deepest longing of young hemlocks”:

And know whatever lies down, like you or a fallen nurse-log,
Will taste the deepest longing of young hemlocks
And learn without fear or favor
This gentlest of undertakings: moss mending your ways
While many spring from one to a wild garden
Flourishing in silence.

To have arrived at a condition of spirituality in body which bespeaks an ardor of compassionateness flowing with fraternal kinship and allegiance even to trees, as well as to other flora of the forest community—is it not to have made of one's own body, in Mark Strand's phrase, a “final embassy of flesh”?

“Waiting in a Rain Forest” is an exercise in the calisthenics of artful lingering, dallying, delaying. The rain, in this beatific haven, is endowed with special powers that could not have been predicted from its normal properties in ordinary landscapes. It is unlike rain anywhere else, and hence, in its capacity to awaken and evolve hidden efficacies in its usual static constitution, it can serve as an evolutionary guide to the human being who, though he has stumbled into this precinct of forest quite by accident, is searching for a formula, or prescription, for achieving the “second growth” he feels is latent and dynamically waiting to be realized in his own nature. Inadvertently, he finds himself taken into the tutelage and guardianship of this enchanted rain:

The rain does not fall here: it stands in the air around you
Always, drifting from time to time like breath
And gathering on the leaf-like
Pale shield lichen as clearly as the intricate channels
Along the bloodwort gleaming like moths' eyes,
Out of the maidenhair
And the running pine and the soft small towers of club moss
Where you must rest now under a green sky
In a land without flowers
Where the wind has fixed its roots and the motionless weather
Leaves you with nothing to do but watch the unbroken
Promises of the earth …

The pale, otherworldly light of this charmed atmosphere is luminous, despite the indirect source—many layers removed—of the lighting: delicate and minute details of the flora glow with unearthly clarity, “the intricate channels / along the bloodwort gleaming like moth's eyes.” Things are more starkly visible in this muted light—not less, as one might expect—than in ordinary daylight, and this eerie highlighting, or italicizing, of the borders and outlines of things hypnotizes the woodsman-poet, creates the illusion that he views objects as if they are lit by mind's light, by a shine emitted directly from the inner spirit. The garden landscape comes to seem a projection of the poet's interior landscape of consciousness, and he feels as if he is peering into a scene cast forth by his own skull's lantern, alit by brain light. Hence, this foreign place beguiles him with flashes of odd familiarity.

Later in the poem, the mental process of confusing interior and exterior landscapes is fascinatingly reversed. Whereas, in the poem's opening lines, the protagonist seems to experience the illusion that he is witnessing a scene that has been mysteriously externalized out of his own human psyche, or exhaled by his human lungs, “the rain … drifting from time to time like breath”; in the closing lines, the beholder seems to have imbibed and internalized the natural landscape that surrounds him—which is the container, which the scene contained?—his own body playing host to the many phyla of the plant kingdom, his physiology itself gradually undergoing metamorphosis into a “wild garden / flourishing in silence.”

In this haze of perplexing transpositions between the world's body and the body's world, it may seem natural and inevitable for the traveler to take the cues for a new mode of his sensibility from the superior intelligence of the rain's being, letting the rain's spirit set the pace and rhythm of his moves as he, too, finds himself content to simply glide and sway and drift from side to side (as does the poem's versification), modeling his motions after the endlessly hovering, floating mists of “the motionless weather” in which “the wind has fixed its roots.” The small shifts and modifications, the gentlest maneuvers, are all suggested to him, and indeed, hypnotically induced in him by the rain's ghostly identity, an apparitional presence so palpable as to seem a personation haunting the air, such that he might put out his hand and touch the rain's limbs. All life, here, hangs in suspension. It seems as if time stands still, as does the unfalling rain. “The motionless weather” is slowness incarnate, a slow country of timelessness and weightlessness. All bodies seem lighter than air; they, too, seeming to float aimlessly between the “green sky” and the earth. The rain tutors, counsels, the guest to follow its lazy halfway meanderings: observe, with the arrested traveler, the rain's vocabulary of minimal comings and goings, of least risings and lowerings. No thing abruptly sails away or falls. All things droop, or loll, or slide. The rain “stands”: it moves, imperceptibly, by gradual shades or shifts:

[drifting/gathering/gleaming/running]

The sharpest movement of the rain is water running down the sleek sides of the pines, but even that steady flowing is so clean, unrippled, and level-slipping (which is running, the water or the pines?) that the unwavering flow of water down slick tree-bark may appear to be no water at all. It may pass for a dry flickering.

Thus follows, in the poem's concluding passage, a matching vocabulary of least human moves, of slowest, most delicate leanings and sprawlings of the human body, as it incubates and opens itself to invasion and transformations by the minimal plantlet-lives of the forest:

[rest now/nothing to do but watch/lies down/taste the deepest longing/gentlest of undertakings/mending your ways/flourishing in silence]

The reader can envision a battalion of healers and menders, commandeered by the wizardry of the moss, in what comes to feel, at the very last, like a wonderful fantasy-prevision of Wagoner's own bodily death and slow, tender reincarnation on the forest floor through the roots, stems, and foliage of the plants. (The cold speech of the earth.) How, indeed, can the reader separate a consummate vision of rebirth from the vision of a death which both preceded the new self coming into being and foretells, with sapience, the full individual human death to come in the indefinite future? The apparent still point at which the poem ends is a “flourishing” silence, since the fully embraced moment of the present is a fulcrum about which the great forces of past death and future death struggle, matched in perfect balance.

The rain forest is “a land without flowers,” since no flower species are needed in this fertile oasis to assert the spirit of freshness and wildness—the role, say, of a wild rose in the desert, or on a sandy plain otherwise barren of vegetation. Everything is flowering here, where, in the “motionless weather,” all active physical life comes to a standstill. Overt energies are all held in check, rechanneled into a total garden universe, a wildflower charge of blossoming that spreads equally in all directions, inflating with bloom every patch of earth and every cubic foot of rain-saturated air. Here, in this fertility, the earth will never break its most extravagant promises to the pilgrim who faithfully keeps his contract to quietly suspend his will to ambition, and sits to keep his watch:

                                        … The motionless weather
Leaves you with nothing to do but watch the unbroken
Promises of the earth …

VIII

Sleeping in the Woods, Wagoner's last full collection of poems before the Collected, concludes with a prayer to the earth, granter of good sleep, good death—“For the sake of my joys, sleepmaker, let me in.” The poem is entitled “Death Song,” and the final line—“I sing for a cold beginning”—is a prevision that has been borne out lavishly in “Travelling Light,” the superb poem which ends the backpacker sequence. In “Travelling Light,” all of the most distressing human interrogations that had obsessed the woodsman persona—ranging from the earthy to the metaphysical—are brilliantly resolved by the poetry's exhaustive vision of transfiguration by cold. Robert Frost had augured in his small classic, “Fire and Ice,” that the vision of bitter cold, the spiritual radiance of ice sight, has as much power to radically change the inner man as the vision of fire; the blaze of sensual passions. “Travelling Light” has fulfilled Frost's prophecy, but in a form and style befitting David Wagoner's own idiom and craft.

What I find to be most remarkable in the whole sequence of poems is Wagoner's consistent pattern of working through harrowing physical crises to questions of survival as a human identity. Devising skills to survive in spirit, breaking new ground in the territory of second growth in the psyche, is intimately bound up, after all, with the body's struggle to perpetuate its wholeness. The two missions, both potentially grueling enterprises which may demand all the human energies each of us can mobilize, are indissolubly yoked together at some more or less distant phase in our racial past. No backpacker who has gotten lost in the woods for weeks, or even days, and has had to train himself to imitate small animals in improvising ways to make a living off the land can ever forget that minimum sustenance to support his body's—or his mind's!—vital functions may be snatched away from him at any time; so, as Frost foretold, we had better be prepared for cold. The adventure into the metaphysics of cold has been carried to its limits in “Travelling Light,” and Wagoner's voyaging to the North Pole, the arctic ice-cap, of his dream gives all readers of poetry a welcome impetus to begin our own travels into the Ice Age of the spirit, and to find such healing manna of ice breath as may await us there.

Beyond all other virtues of the poem, I am most struck by the unwavering and astonishing elevation of its language. The very crux of major poetry is the successful improvising of an experimental language, the finding of a vital new idiom with roots in common speech. In “Travelling Light,” Wagoner plays the most dangerous game with language, like a man juggling chunks of dry ice without asbestos gloves to protect his fingers from burns or frostbite. The lovers in the poem know how great a risk they take journeying into the center of the ice storm of vision, the “dazzling white-out.” But the promise of a wisdom and revelation that can transfigure their identities—the very seat of their sensibilities—awaits them, and the anticipated rewards clearly surpass the austere trials and deprivations they are braced to welcome. The transfiguration by cold is illimitable. It touches everything, from the air they breathe to the act of breathing itself, and everything touched by this cold is changed utterly, changed permanently. A terrible chilled beauty is born.

If the dozen vultures in Wagoner's short poem “In the Badlands” could read English, and if this poem were to be inscribed on the “level claybed” below, they might well honor its extraordinary language by mistaking its accents—just as they mistook the lovemaking movements of the amorous couple—“for the thresh and crux and sprawled languor of death”: such a writing style, in common with exalted acts of love, both resembles the process of dying, and embodies secrets, engimas, unmistakably wrenched from death itself.

In “Travelling Light,” the only poem in this sequence with two central protagonists, Wagoner completes a cycle of nature-hike lovepoems that have spanned about a dozen years in his career, initiated by the poem which I take to have been his first work of major stature, “Guide to Dungeness Spit.” “Travelling Light” is a strange voyage into snow country. The traveler-beloveds do not guess what they shall find here, but their first impression is that they glidingly traverse—as in a dream of floating—a once-familiar terrain turned foreign, but inviting (“deeply, starkly appealing / like a lost home,” as he’d foreseen the next night's campsite would be, in the first poem of this sequence, “Breaking Camp”). It is their homeland, the country they have known all their lives, but it is completely transfigured, despite the many recognizable outlines of known “landmarks” buried under the deep snow:

Through this most difficult country, this world we had known
As a cross-grained hummocky bog-strewn jumble of brambles
Stretching through summer,
We find after blizzard and sunlight, travelling in the winter,
A rolling parkland under our snowshoes
Where every color
Has drifted out of our shadows into a brittle whiteness.

The poem's second line wonderfully condenses and epitomizes the various landscapes comprised by the word country, deftly investing this word with a broader range of metaphorical overtones than would seem possible so early in the poem's discourse. It is America, to be sure. It is, too, the homestead of lavish sensual pleasures, a bounty shared by the lovers in their youth's long summer. Finally, it is the homesite—or birthplace—of Wagoner's art in the language of sensory excess. All of these landscapes survive, persisting under the deep blanket of snow, but they are transfigured—their difficult complexities simplified to a stark oneness, a singleness: or rather, it is a landscape characterized by total absence of color, “a brittle whiteness,” a colorlessness borne of the whole rainbow continuum of hues absorbed, and transcended. The color void is strikingly imaged as the non-color of human shadows cast upon the snow.

A man on foot can suffer only one guiding principle
Next to his shadow.

surmised the persona in “From Here to There,” but if our shadows, even, have been drained of all color, such that they fade and blend in with the landscape, they, too, must lose their power to guide our travels. White shadows! What better image for a transfiguration by cold so total that it proceeds, by one stroke, from our visible faces to the hidden visage of our identities mirrored by our shadows. Color is magical. For the hiking lovers to perceive, slowly, that “every color has drifted out of our shadows” is equivalent to their observing the process of transfiguration of self at firsthand, lost color by color by color:

And so we begin shuffling our way forward
Above the invisible
Deadfalls and pitfallen brush, above the deeply buried
Landmarks and blazes we had found misleading,
Above the distraction
Of flowers and sweet berries and bird-songs that held us
Back, breathing and tasting, sitting, listening.

Without even shadows for guides, the travelers advance slowly and cautiously into their new cold heaven/cold earth. They proceed at a “shuffling” gait, partly to keep from falling, partly to allow time for the new reality to sink in. They would slowly savor, together, the visible remnants of their old buried landscapes, surveying whatever survives from their past as they advance into the uncharted territory of the future. The catalog of milestones in the sunken terrain is anything but arbitrary, “deadfalls” and “pitfallen brush” signifying two categories of traps, those set by hunters to catch their prey and those that may trip up the hunter himself. These images enable the author to re-experience, in memory, the valuable lessons of existence related in detail in the two hunting poems, “Tracking” and “Being Shot.” “Landmarks” and “blazes” were found to be “misleading,” since, as in “From Here to There,” our sensory perceptions of these earth signals and fire signals are so often confounded and distorted by the mirage. These phenomena, imperfectly witnessed in detail, are now viewed as having pointed us in the wrong overall direction as well: the province of sensory awareness. The next two lines recount separate but interdependent lists of data which, taken together, constitute our “distraction”:

(1) The list of nature's luxuriant beauties—“flowers and sweet berries and bird-songs.”

(2) The list of human agencies—the breath, the senses—for inhaling and imbibing these beauties—“breathing and tasting, sitting, listening.”

Both catalogs enumerate data which are now perceived to have “held us / back,” but nature's beauties and our senses are not so much revoked as transcended—hence, the three repetitions of “above,” expanding the word's overtones from a term of physical positioning to a term denoting scales of mentality. The lovers are voyaging into a snow Elysium, a more elevated spiritual condition which passes beyond the life of sensual beauties, but contains and assimilates them rather than repudiating the youthful heyday of their earthly passions. Their passage upward into the cold heaven of purification proceeds through a series of graduated steps up a ladder, though they maintain to the poem's finish the illusion that they travel on a horizontal itinerary across a conventional flat snowscape, bordered by a visible horizon.

Having severed themselves from the tug of sensual excesses, still lurking seductively under the snow crust, they take fortification from having shrugged off those burdens, much as if they had emptied some material contents from their backpacks to lighten the load of freightage, and, traveling lighter, they find themselves able to augment their pace from “shuffling” to “hurrying”:

Now we are hurrying
With the smoothswift scuttling of webs, our feet not touching
The earth, our breath congealing, our ears hearing
More than we can believe in
In the denser air, disembodied by the cold, the shouting,
Shouting from miles away, the slamming of gunfire,
The ghosts of axes.

This passage achieves an amazing concentration of craft as it enumerates, in rapid succession, each of the baffling hypnotic symptoms of the ascent from a condition of mortality into the dream-life of the cold heaven: the sensation, in body, is experienced as lightening of physical mass (as a man might experience, say, walking on the moon—indeed, much in the poem's second half suggests the magical luminosity of a lunar landscape, divested of color, a landscape which never darkens, but is always aglow with a muted light like neon), approaching weightlessness, their footfalls growing lighter and springier, their bodies seeming to levitate as in a dream of floating. What I take to be most impressive in this passage—an aspect of the whole poem's prevailing style, but more intensified in these lines—is Wagoner's power to evoke otherworldly resonances with undistorted naturalistic detail, the haunted dimension of experience seeming to well up naturally and irresistibly from normal daily events. The delineation of mundane happenings with precision and lucidity never deters the supernatural aura which envelops the narration, and it is difficult for a reader to begin to guess how it is that the ghostly radiance deepens, rather than beclouds, the credibility of the life-resembling details:

(1) “The smoothswift scuttling of webs, our feet not touching / the earth”: This unarguably accurate rendering of the literal experience of walking on snowshoes projects, simultaneously and mysteriously, a vision of the shoes transfigured into weblike wings, sky-sails, lifting the walkers, their feet levitating. (Likewise, the other varied metamorphoses that dazzle across these lines. In all instances, the mystical echoings and reechoings are generated purely and without strain by events reported with photographic realism.)

(2) “Our breath congealing”: Exhaled breath not only fogs in bitter cold air, but also appears to crystallize into particles, and it may seem to an observer as though his own breath is strangely acquiring supernatural mass and density.

(3) “Our ears hearing / more than we can believe in / in the denser air, disembodied by the cold, the shouting, / shouting from miles away”: Sounds in the distance are greatly altered, in transit, while traveling across a wide expanse of snowscape, and may indeed hypnotize walkers into feeling as if they hear disembodied voices of the dead, voices out of the past, both the air and the ears seeming bewitched. The literal sounds do seem enigmatic and strange, an eerie combination of distortions produced by the snow and cold. The reverberations muffle the clarity of sound, while the starkness and crisp reception in such air makes the fidelity of sound seem enhanced, suggesting clear voices traveling an abnormally long distance. The distances traversed seem to convert from spatial to temporal quantities, land expanse transforming into time expanse. The voices heard in this air, “disembodied by the cold,” are experienced as voices lifted from graves, voices escaping the bodies which housed them in life.

(4) “The slamming of gunfire, / the ghosts of axes”: As with the disembodied human voices, so it is with the reports of guns and axes, drifting into the present across a timeless expanse of hundreds of years of America's past.

This air is enchanted, charged with the yelps and howls of warring ancestors, the white men and the red men trading threats, exchanging deaths. Their shouting spirits tear through the air yet, to be beheld, overheard, by those few who pass beyond the limits of ordinary sensory experience into a timeless geography in which America's past, present, and future merge, in flux. The ears of these most fortunate travelers still operate in this sphere, but their senses have grown otherworldly, clairvoyant, traveling backward and forward in time, freely spanning generations in seconds. The author, like his protagonists, finds himself moving across great distances in his personal life and career. He gravitates, predictably, back to recurrent themes that have brought him long-standing grief and pain, his countrymen's unscrupulous decimations of wildlife (“the slamming of gunfire”), the heedless devastation of forests (“the ghosts of axes”). No one man can ever correct or offset moral wrongdoing on such a vast scale, but in his own person David Wagoner has undergone strenuous rites of purification in this poem's healing vision of cold, the events in his private memory converging with the events of his country's history, and both are transfigured, his soul cleansed by the ice vision embodied in the deepearth-frost of his language.

What began as a journey, spatial and horizontal, across a snowy plain, ends as a flight, temporal and vertical, backward in time and descending into the mind's interior snowscape, “the simply amazing world of our first selves.” The traveling lovers, innocently taking a walk together in snowshoes across a great expanse of snow, find themselves unexpectedly swept back into their youth, back into their country's stretch of past history, and back into earlier phases of the evolution of their race; at last they find themselves swept forward, voyaging ahead into a prevision of their deaths, surviving the exposure to death's secrets in full consciousness, and returning unharmed, but enriched with a haunted, unearthly intelligence, a gift of the grave:

And then the cold-spelled morning will make us stare
Into each other's eyes
For the first signs of whiteness, stare at the ends of fingers,
Then into the distance where the whitening
Marks the beginning
Of the place we were always looking for: so full of light.
So full of flying light, it is all feathers
Which we must wear
As we had dreamed we would …

They are approaching a condition of spirit in which all things of this world appear to be giving up their mass, shedding their substance, their bodies, and growing weightless like feathers, the feathers an American Indian wears when he dances a prayer to light, dances to blaze with “flying light” in the spirit. They have moved from light-weight to featherweight to “flying light.” The travelers, who had supposed their destination was to be a geographical place, a region that can be pinpointed on the map of a horizontal landscape, have found, instead, that they have been traveling into light, light itself the place, a condition and site combined, and they themselves are becoming the light they enter, a new inner light by which all things beheld are observed to glisten with a ghostly luster, filling the void of snowblindness with a new structure of vision, supplanting the old sensory vision of the retina:

But snowblindly reaching
Into this dazzling white-out, finding where we began,
Not naming the wonder yet but remembering
The simply amazing
World of our first selves, where believing is once more seeing
The cold speech of the earth in the colder air
And knowing it by heart.

“Dazzling white-out” is indicative of the crowning moment of transfiguration by cold, the voyaging lovers reaching the end-point of their odyssey, fulfilling the implicit message of the title. They move in their diversified passageways, as in the countless tunnels, corridors, of a labyrinth, and, as the radius of their travels expands, their orbits resembling a series of widening rings of light, nimbuses around a planet, the word traveling opens outward, embracing a steadily broader spectrum of human and trans-human experience. The word itself is sprung into a metaphor which radiates tributaries of meaning in all directions, and most pertinently, the author finds he is traveling back to earlier stages of his own career, lower rungs of his ladder of authorship. Perched on each of these steps, in turn, he finds he is ideally placed to take inventory of his present stockpile of resources, his workmanlike supplies, and he can make ready to launch a fresh start, a new itinerary of travels in the world of poetic language: “The cold speech of the earth,” a new rich lode, or vein, of ore to be lifted straight from that indigenous mine of so much surpassing American poetry—Whitman, Frost, Masters, William Stafford—the ground of common speech. David Wagoner had broken new ground in that mine-shaft before, but now he has excavated a much deeper trench.