Cairns

John Thiem

East of Greyrock Meadow
west of Seaman Resevoir
a ridge-among the trees are traces still

of the old Wintersteen trail
and chasms still from Brinkhoff's mine
where Rattlesnake Jake made love to Ruby Mica.

The path is hardly there,
signposted, through, with mounds of stone
gravely marking the slow demise of trail,

each cairn a world,
each heap like any other
but as with snowflakes every one an other.

Monuments like this
wayfarers seldom leave behind,
at most a can, a heap of orange peel

but those who place the stones
choose memory, and he who laid
this stone may lie, himself, beneath another,

some humble pile of stone
memorial enough for him
memorial enough for me.

Touchstones, earthbones, tombstones
homunculus or tumulus
humble or tumbled, cairns of Wintersteen,

herms of ancient Greece
Shiva stones of India
pebbles on the Jewish tombs in Prague.

Someone lays a stone,
to keep the cairn, to mark a way.
I feel the farflung camaraderie

of blue moon walkers,
who roam the magic ways
flowing invisibly between the cairns,

where each will lay a stone
for who comes after. Our metaphysics?
A path that wanders through immensities.

I feel community-
the wanderer of Wintersteen
finds a cairn, eyes reaching for the next,

stops, ponders those
who came before, and knows a culture,
that cairn to which we each must bring a stone.

I seek another cairn.
The one I dreamed. There. I see
the shapes of space in between the stones.

Ant-like, I crawl around
caverns of cairn, feel how forms
of creamy curving void and jagged gap

constellate a truth.
This negative of stone, sign
whose pattern, though, I still cannot describe.

Slope of crack and crevice,
hole and hollow, I'd have you see
them holographically, but all I know

is Time's flow in and out
of mazes, chasms, bowls and pools,
bedrock of a Spirit Stream where words

slip through interstices
of stone, and the shapes of space are mute,
their eloquence, the silence of cairns.