Taking to the Hills

By Rachel Wetzsteon 1967–2009 Rachel Wetzsteon

If walking, like wine, only abets a sad mood

let’s try it, I said, and I did:

over these hills that have never known sorrow

no thoughtful moon passes. Dig until a hill is level, and unearth

only earth. Take pride in knowing the chemical makeup

of rain, the sum total of harmful vapors in any sunset.

For if you must drag in the old lines

about suicidal willows, star’s stacked for or against you,

you clutter a limitless, soaring landscape

with your own baggage. Night of love,

day of omens of night, great mountain

of realized hopes, valley where bitter winds

blow the dispossessed into raving lunatics—

what are they but shady projections

of passing whims, vastly oversimplified versions

of something infinitely greater? This vision before you

is nothing but a triad of trees, hills, river,

steadfast and eternal. But soon you start to feel restless

and when, setting out to take a roll of photos,

you note the disturbing absence of a road,

your suavity crumbles: you deafen the sky

and serenade the moon, fall prostrate before pines

saying oh, come back, spirit of the place which,

lifeless without you, blossoms into something

sumptuously more than mediating madness;

come back, massive oaks that await our coming;

to carve initials is to be truly human;

the days are dappled with our passions,

the mountains rise and fall with our glories and follies.

Rachel Wetzsteon, “Taking to the Hills” from The Other Stars, published by Penguin Books, Inc. Copyright © 1994 by Rachel Wetzsteon. Reprinted by permission of Sonja Wetzsteon.

Source: The Other Stars (Penguin Books, 1994)

Biography

Born in Manhattan, poet and editor Rachel Wetzsteon received degrees from Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and Columbia University. She made her home in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, which is the setting for many of her formally assured poems. Influenced by Charles Baudelaire, Soren Kierkegaard, and Philip Larkin, Wetzsteon infused her urban and emotional landscapes with a dry wit. As critic Adam . . .

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