My hands grip rocks.

My feet slip. I stand, straighten and slip again. Damn. Not half-way up this goddamn conveyor of crushed rock. Not pea gravel but real rocks: golf sized, cornered with perfect points, dusty. Bits that sticks to your hand.

I crouch. Any small movement and I move inches down the steep slope.

I turn sideways and push my feet in, to make steps; lift one leg knee-high to make another  size-12 terrace. Each bearing-down compresses half a foot; I step and stabilize and step again, each clattery footprint perpendicular to the fall.

If I move quickly I overcome the slide some. No single foothold is steady, each grinds down. I cannot stay in place.

After a dozen aerobic sidesteps I stop, turn, sit. Breathe hard, ratcheting. My fat belly wants to fold but cannot, presses against my shirt front, leaves pink-skinned half-moons between each button. I hurt after moments of palms-down, from the pressure it takes to keep from sliding away, of losing what double-effort wrought.

I lift one and examine it, tiny flakes impressed; the other presses harder, to stay in place. "Ows" escape. My heels skitter below my point-pricked ass, unable to form small ledges in the loose stones. My hand's a mesh of reddened pits and scraped, floury hurt, gloved in debris. It sands me bad to rub them clean. I shake and flail instead, wipe tenderly on khakis.

I switch and the other palm is worse.

I can't sit; it's too much work to keep my place. Getting up, turning, costs me a yard backwards. I resume the lift, dig-in, lift, dig-in. I am still breathless, badly so after just three steps. I try managing my breath, blowing it out as through a tunnel. It helps for three more steps.

I scan above, for some lesser angle. None. These manufactured scree fields are formulaic: acute enough for run-off, constrained just so to keep it from collapse. The rocks but slowly fall away; more like decades of shift. I imagine the research; I wrote about it down below, in the tiny bent-spiral notebook now shielding four inches of my sore ass. Useless. I curse the precise engineers. Three degrees less and I could turn and march uphill like a young man.

I stop again. The field above looks white in the sun. I sit again, then lie down prone, head uphill. I can stay this way, with rocks more evenly distributed under me, if I remain very still, just these points here and here, the ones who immediately remind. Insist. From the very first. "Ow", I say.

I blaze with heat. I pull my shirt out and forward, make it a little looser around my gut. I slide a few inches with the effort. Everything I do returns lower, loss, return. Scratch my nose, some pebbles roll under my back, a half-inch. Some bit of me is hung up, so I raise a fraction to settle better -- and slide one inch more; I agitate, down another few, settle back. And then more uncomfortable. New pinches. Hard facets.

Don't think about it. I bend my knees, lose more. Sweat puddles along my back, ribs, down my brow, inside my collar.

My feet are hot in thin canvas, growing numb. No water. I close my eyes over and over, squeezing hard sometimes. My breath slows, I move my hands over the stones, stiff -armed, over my head. Rock Angel, I laugh. If only I could swim up this.

I try not to think how stupid this was, coming back to see where the boy died, in that roaring ice-walled river. He was young. I was young. I helped his friend, but the first boy, the driver, died grinning, drunk; broken back, leg, hip. Up to his chest  in 33 degrees fahrenheit, slamming thru his crushed Econoline. Too deep, too far, too gone, to reach, just 5 yards away.

I looked for the boy down there, I stood with pad and pencil, a greasy 4B, to bring him back to me, to look at at that last goodbye smile, that said "I went out a pistol, by gun, I give her what fer."

Nothin'. All I saw was rising flies, and wet rocks, the cool spray and the river's loud rimmrum schklosch repeat repeat, the sound controlling everything. All these years I thought he had nothing to say, nothing better or more perfect than that look to give me, thru the shattered door.

Now I know: he smiled sardonicus, for it was too loud to be heard.

He was potted errancy itself. Afraid to look down, at the broken angles, the wrong attachments that were his last dance, and if he felt any need to sing boddhisattva, or curse with a blood fever, or whisper his too-late sorrows? it was drowned out.

It was to be drowning for him there, at the moment coming soon, when he lost the muscle to hold his neck upright, and stopped pressing his weight on the frame. He folded into the water, his head anointed by oily rags that caught and bobbed on torn metal below his bleeding neck.

What did I think? that arriving 30 years later, moleskin unbanded, chewed pencil ready, I would see what I missed, I would not turn away this time, at that look of fear, as it just began to arc into his young, stupid grin?

No. No such vision came to me, just the long-needled spruce, sussussing like soft cymbals on dwarf cottonwood scrub. The tall weeds and boulders like strewn toys. The crash of the river. The hot sun.

No one there but me.

If I could I would slowly flap arms and rise like ginger over these grey imps. I think about physics. Why swimming works in water. The density of hot air. I rise, turn, and slip again. My ankles hurt; I re-assemble, push up, turn over, stand. I straighten, wipe my wet face, smear it with damp, muddy chalk. Forty-five minutes and I'm not even close to half way up.

When I was in my 20's I would have scrambled up and sung doin' it. I curse my age, my sore shoulders, my stiff legs, my pound bags of peanut M&Ms, my mounds of mashed garlic potatoes, in Montana, in Brooklyn, in High Falls. All the calamari and linguine, the kreplach and brisket and egg noodles, the cheese, the stupid helpings of cheese.

I slip, grab rocks, fall anyway. I twist, land on my ass, something breaks in the pocket. Phone. Still I can't hold up, fall on point of elbow, zang like drilled bone it hurts.

I twisted my back and neck. Everything stings, aches, tightens, and drips. The sun blazes white on white spotlight. Red is no longer a color; it's a stain of  hard burn on face, arms, neck.

I re-organize on all fours. My knees are pin-cushioned by shale points, gnomic rubble. I roll and sit, pulling knees close, brushing rocks and bits of skin off hands, then shirt, then knees, then hands again. Red smears. There are tears now, tiny plumes of threads around a jagged red volcano on my knee. I study it close, but sitting like this makes it hard to breathe, so I stretch my legs out straight.

The sun burns so bad, on my forearms, my face. I want to cry at how little I can stand it, these prickly goddamn rocks, against the backs of my legs. My skin is old. These rocks want to push inside me, I think, to commune with bone. They know I am writ small, writ off, nothing but paper guts, crinoline mind, hiccuppy heart. I smile at this line. The sweat drops faster.

My mouth pulls down. My eyes sting. I get up, pain in every angle, bent funny, and charge up, make it like a crab another ten feet, for twenty feet's effort, up the slope. I am making noise. I stop, breathe two times, charge again. I use just my right side this time, it's easier.

I take two steps, lose it: I turn my ankle into a bag of knives and hot cables and fall, face first, slide five, ten, fifteen feet back. My palms raw. Torn. I roll on my back, then all the way around to all fours.

"Shit." I say, and other things. I can't stay up, or sit. My hands are constellations of red sparklers.

Up on one foot. One knee. Dizzy. I see electric snowflakes hedge-trimming every single thing; when I close my eyes tight they turn blue, then cobalt blue, then canary yellow. My head hurts.

I touch fingers to stones, to steady myself. I stand. How far? Fifty? Eighty? My neck is tight. My left eye droops. I am frowning, the left corner. I look up and white layered pinwheels blind me.

I look below. No focus: there are two rivers one just above and to the right of the other. I lift my hands to my face but feel only the right cheek, beard stubble. My left arm is somewhere. I know I raised it. I turn my head and two worlds slide around -- I find it! on my other cheek, or maybe ear. The fingers, like lead, fall to my neck.

I turn but one leg drags and I fall again, my hands like tetherballs, my left ear and temple dull as a cement sack when I hit, hard.

I breathe.

Domino, I think. The sun fries my neck, my right arm. My right arm turns me over; it tries. I see myself from space, from the treetops across the canyon wall, the silly figure of pink and grey and tan and now red, stepping, sitting, scribbling, laughing, falling, going up, going down.

I laugh and it comes out "huhluff huwhuh huhfuhhh", and the line between the left corner of my mouth and the hollow place deep in my neck becomes a radiant steel spear; it starts in my teeth and buries itself in my ribs. I open my eyes wide and see two worlds swim, one ascending to the sky, to the light, one descending, falling away.

"My hat", I remember, down on the ledge below, it comes out: "ma-ah".

Breathe.

Breathe. The sun scorches my right cheek.

A time goes by. I turn and hook my arm and pull up, up, roll some, onto the dead side, crawling up. The gravel piles under my chest. Are my legs moving? I stop.

Breathe.

Time goes by. It is getting dark. My right leg is wet. Am I in a stream? Is it raining, on high? A lattice of wet white lines overhead. I blink, they settle into strung pearls. Blink, wet candles.

Darker. Tongue stuck out. I turn my head and smile, one side up, one side down. Lights go by, up there. "Help me" I say, it sounds like "huhpmuhh"

-

I dream about a home on a plain, seen from a badland cliff-edge. Hot and golden is the immense castellated home, made of flat, gold stone, perfectly smooth; the top three stories are old-red roofs against a wet green-blue, ablaze in the last full light of true sunset coming in from behind us.

I simply lift high to the top, to the great entrance that floats hundreds of feet above the liming orchards, the watered ground far below. I hear shouts under me, flashes of their lights; they raise me up.

I am inside. I turn and fall gently on the floor inside and stare rapturous and calm at the broken portcullis, the open roof, the sky-filled terraces all around, the tall windows. The floor beneath me is pin-point tip-tops, a thousand alpine conifers: itchy, sticky, spinning, The sun blazes into me and I remember my dream, the real dream of the real night before. My last dream. I remember:

I am with my father and we are both men and I have forgotten his hands and my blood.

I step up to him. Calm moments. I remember: I am taller now. I straighten up, leaning in -- and someone flares a light on us, for just a moment, bright, then away, gone molten blue, gone cobalt, and in that last backlit moment my father, frail from 55 years of polio and hate, turns just so and lowers as I rise up.

I am that simple inch taller. Calm moments pass, and it is those moments I remember, lying on the slow fingers of ancient bristlecones, the sky open and darkling before me, pierced by last rays.

A cloud passes. From last bright to dim light, I write on the sky. I smile: that's all. Just light, then gone.

The light fades, re-emerges. I grin so hard my cheek is stiff. Some light, sometimes.

I hear voices

-- shhh --

and I am

-- hush now --

slowly shaken to sleep.

//