Galen Clark Recalls Sunrise
in the High Sierras

by SEBASTIAN BITTICKS

An intimate friend asked, “Galen, you are a good observer of Nature and have studied the clouds up here for many years, what is your prediction of the coming weather?” He quietly replied: “Ask the new arrival, the fellow that just came here yesterday. He knows more about it than I do.” 
—from The Call of Gold by Newell D. Chamberlain (1936) 

I’ve not come on the good works of last year
but lived so long under Sentinel Dome its shadow

seems more the sweep of my own hand.
Ask someone who’s coiled our new roads

in his mind, whose heart is warm 
as a carriage house. He knows better than I do. 

Pack bacon spent, the bivouac’s deer down 
to a shoulder, what would you guess remains? 

In truth, my memory shifts like smoke 
escaping a flue. Say I know the valley 

better than myself. Who could choose? 
And nothing stays where it’s supposed to. 

Stone in the roads becomes a powder, the Merced 
overflows. I would walk atop moraine for days 

never touching dirt. Now it’s broken, rolls away. 
How long then to turn the weedy mind? 

Even the falls follow the wind. Here I stoop 
to touch my cheek on the fresh-faced golf green 

though it’s been finished a full season. So 
ask someone carried in with the stew bones; 

he keeps faith with the Nation’s steady time 
where I had a dozen dawns just yesterday.