[Camino Poem 9] Telephone Poles

this poem wins at: having startling imagery, opening us to wonder (washing our eyes 'clean of belief'!), and waking us up to re-evaluate our relationship to the natural world.

it does not win at: cheerfulness.

i was already missing green - although the camino has many virtues, wilderness is not one of them. the trail is rarely far from roads, and frequently runs through towns and villages.
and this was a hard day for me. i spent much of it experiencing a heavy mood that made it challenging to walk (was i stunned to stone?). maybe it was part of a cleansing to let new life come through.

a shout out to my dinner company that night - the humor helped!

Day 9  - Telephone Poles – John Updike (1932-2009)

They have been with us a long time.

They will outlast the elms.

Our eyes, like the eyes of a savage sieving the trees

In his search for game,

Run through them. They blend along small-town streets

Like a race of giants that have faded into mere mythology.

Our eyes, washed clean of belief,

Lift incredulous to their fearsome crowns of bolts, trusses,

struts, nuts, insulators, and such

Barnacles as compose

These weathered encrustations of electrical debris

Each a Gorgon’s head, which, seized right,

Could stun us to stone.

Yet they are ours. We made them.

See here, where the cleats of linemen

Have roughened a second bark

Onto the bald trunk. And these spikes

Have been driven sideways at intervals handy for human legs.

The Nature of our construction is in every way

A better fit than the Nature it displaces

What other tree can you climb where the birds’ twitter,

Unscrambled, is English? True, their thin shade is negligible,

But then again there is not that tragic autumnal

Casting-off of leaves to outface annually.

These giants are more constant than evergreens

By being never green.

(I walked from Los Arcos to Viana - 18km)