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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=410429" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>A Day on the Big Branch</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0">Still half drunk, after a night at cards,<br>with the grey dawn taking us unaware<br>among our guilty kings and queens, we drove<br>far North in the morning, winners, losers,<br>to a stream in the high hills, to climb up to a place<br>one of us knew, with some vague view<br>of cutting losses or consolidating gains<br>by the old standard appeal to the wilderness,<br>the desert, the empty places of our exile,<br>bringing only the biblical bread and cheese<br>and cigarettes got from a grocer’s on the way,<br>expecting to drink only the clear cold water<br>among the stones, and remember, or forget.<br>Though no one said anything about atonement,<br>there was still some purgatorial idea<br>in all those aching heads and ageing hearts<br>as we climbed the giant stair of the stream,<br>reaching the place around noon.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">It was as promised, a wonder, with granite walls<br>enclosing ledges, long and flat, of limestone,<br>or, rolling, of lava; within the ledges<br>the water, fast and still, pouring its yellow light,<br>and green, over the tilted slabs of the floor,<br>blackened at shady corners, falling in a foam<br>of crystal to a calm where the waterlight<br>dappled the ledges as they leaned<br>against the sun; big blue dragonflies hovered<br>and darted and dipped a wing, hovered again<br>against the low wind moving over the stream,<br>and shook the flakes of light from their clear wings.<br>This surely was it, was what we had come for,<br>was nature, though it looked like art with its<br>grey fortress walls and laminated benches<br>as in the waiting room of some petrified station.<br>But we believed; and what it was we believed<br>made of the place a paradise<br>for ruined poker players, win or lose,<br>who stripped naked and bathed and dried out on the rocks<br>like gasping trout (the water they drank<br>making them drunk again), lit cigarettes and lay back<br>waiting for nature to say the last word<br>—as though the stones were Memnon stones,<br>which, caught in a certain light, would sing.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">The silence (and even the noise of the waters<br>was silence) grew pregnant; that is the phrase,<br>grew pregnant; but nothing else did.<br>The mountains brought forth not a mouse, and the rocks,<br>unlike the ones you would expect to find<br>on the slopes of Purgatory or near Helicon,<br>mollified by muses and with a little give to ’em,<br>were modern American rocks, and hard as rocks.<br>Our easy bones groaned, our flesh baked<br>on one side and shuddered on the other; and each man<br>thought bitterly about primitive simplicity<br>and decadence, and how he had been ruined<br>by civilization and forced by circumstances<br>to drink and smoke and sit up all night<br>inspecting those perfectly arbitrary cards<br>until he was broken-winded as a trout on a rock<br>and had no use for the doctrines of Jean Jacques<br>Rousseau, and could no longer afford<br>a savagery whether noble or not; some<br>would never batter that battered copy of Walden<br>again.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"> But all the same,<br>the water, the sunlight, and the wind<br>did something; even the dragonflies<br>did something to the minds full of telephone<br>numbers and flushes, to the flesh<br>sweating bourbon on one side and freezing on the other.<br>And the rocks, the old and tumbling boulders<br>which formed the giant stair of the stream,<br>induced (again) some purgatorial ideas<br>concerning humility, concerning patience<br>and enduring what had to be endured,<br>winning and losing and breaking even;<br>ideas of weathering in whatever weather,<br>being eroded, or broken, or ground down into pebbles<br>by the stream’s necessitous and grave currents.<br>But to these ideas did any purgatory<br>respond? Only this one: that in a world<br>where even the Memnon stones were carved in soap<br>one might at any rate wash with the soap.</div><div style="margin:10px 0">After a time we talked about the War,<br>about what we had done in the War, and how near<br>some of us had been to being drowned, and burned,<br>and shot, and how many people we knew<br>who had been drowned, or burned, or shot;<br>and would it have been better to have died<br>in the War, the peaceful old War, where we were young?<br>But the mineral peace, or paralysis, of those<br>great stones, the moving stillness of the waters,<br>entered our speech; the ribs and blood<br>of the earth, from which all fables grow,<br>established poetry and truth in us,<br>so that at last one said, “I shall play cards<br>until the day I die,” and another said,<br>“in bourbon whisky are all the vitamins<br>and minerals needed to sustain man’s life,”<br>and still another, “I shall live on smoke<br>until my spirit has been cured of flesh.”</div><div style="margin:10px 0">Climbing downstream again, on the way home<br>to the lives we had left empty for a day,<br>we noticed, as not before, how of three bridges<br>not one had held the stream, which in its floods<br>had twisted the girders, splintered the boards, hurled<br>boulder on boulder, and had broken into rubble,<br>smashed practically back to nature,<br>the massive masonry of span after span<br>with its indifferent rage; this was a sight<br>that sobered us considerably, and kept us quiet<br>both during the long drive home and after,<br>till it was time to deal the cards.</div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><br />poem by <a href="http://en.citatepedia.ro/by.php?a=Howard+Nemerov">Howard Nemerov</a><div class=q>
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<script type="text/javascript" src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=citatepedia" async="async"></script><div style="display:inline-block" class="addthis_sharing_toolbox" data-url="http://en.citatepedia.ro/comments.php?id=410429" data-title="A Day on the Big Branch de Howard Nemerov" data-description="Still half drunk, after a night at cards,
with the grey dawn taking us unaware
among our guilty kings and queens, we drove
far North in the morning, winners, losers,
to a stream in the high hills, to climb up to a place
one of us knew, with some v..."></div>
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