from Portrait of the Puy de Manse

Coming from the north of the peak dotted with thin pines. Brown grasses, soft contours, like those near the Puy de Dôme. 


Sounds of a brook near the path we’ve chosen (a cascade of gurgling after the rain yesterday and overnight).

 

 



 
Thinking about everything the Puy de Manse teaches us. Humbled by its reminders of the course we’ve set: patient observation, the labor of walking, waiting for words to come, the hope of attaining form. In front of the mountain, so unlike being in New York or before the Atlantic, experiencing a “lack of words.”


Pine trees and larches, to the left, flanking the massif. Raising our eyes toward the heights of the Puy. A little snow spots cavities and hollows. The fleckless coat of its smooth and round declivities.


 

 



Odor of manure spread over fields. Wet shadows of random trees. Climbing back up the slopes of wet prairie grass.

 
Manse, the poem, stuck in the difficulty of language to capture Manse, the mountain. To get close enough to it to capture it. To get in to touch it.

 

 
 



 

 

 

 
It doesn’t seem to present challenges: simple, frontal, basic. We should be able to give it a name easily. But naming isn’t capturing! Naming is only the start. “A series of starts.” Failures at communicating. Ellipsis. And, in the end, something outside itself.


What can language do face-to-face with the inertia and the power of something?
 


Non-prosaic segments,
convalescent prose:
the little we can say about it.
 
 




A little movement everywhere.
But the movement wearies quickly
here.

 

 


What, then, would it mean to “say something implicitly?”







This stream (not the mountain stream in Ancelle, so far away, which flows into this stream) flows into the flower prairie; flows, like a rivulet, between two grassy banks; infiltrates a copse; grows a little lazy near the big ford (where the animals are used to drinking and traipsing across); tumbles down into a tiny valley where it disappears beyond the highway. We listen to it slip away beyond the horizon.

 

 
 



In the prairies encircling the Manse, moles have dug extensive holes. At least they have found a way of approaching it and touching upon its reality. They know the terrain better than us. Know more about the reality of its soils.

 






By not committing, by turning around and around, the mountain emits a big fat laugh.







Climbing back up the path, gray pebbles and gravel, tossed across the prairies. Climbing back up to the foot of the Puy where it changes course, following the curvature of the fields. Then it juts up, turning a little; leaving, to the left, its forested triangle already
spotted
           – spruces and larches,
                                                 greige and green,
                                                                                from the foothills upwards,
covering the flank –.

 
 
From this side, a bit of gully erosion afflicts the base of the Manse.
Collapse: debris.

 

Young black pines dumped on the edge of the fault.



An oblong pit, naked and exposed to the sky, soon to be home
to vegetation.







It’s cooler here.
Now the mountain is an indolent beast. Or a marine mammal. More a walrus than a seal or sea lion; mostly because of its skin.
 


Grasses, trampled by the herds, then frostbit by the snow.


 

 

 
Leaving the new Puy. First hump, perfectly formed, not ostentatious. To its side, its twin, a second enormous protuberant hump, where the majority of slopes descend,

                        tumbling toward
                        the valley

that opens
to our left,

                        or, little by little,
                        the elevation gain

diminishes.







We’re standing behind it. Little scrubby pines in a broken row, daubs of snow, and fence posts endeavor to invent pigments not naturally those of the mountain.


Wasted effort! Everything collapses into this mute hue that spreads over everything and grows into the earth: the color of the colossus is that of dry grass.

 

 

 

On the flat bit of the chubby summit, different pastures are marked out by fences.


The climb that makes the landscape soften: everything points to how the herds come to the top to enjoy the view.

 

 




Irritated by the nothingness and the formlessness, a crow, taking flight from the summit, knobbly with fence posts, caws ironically.







Manse, sown words?
Weak means of approach?

 

How much more time
must be spent on this offensive?

 

How much time still
to collect the words
                        and speak?