Mountains Walk on Water
Sunrise a rose-red crack below the clouds, above the fog;
folds of ranges north edges burning
Shadow hollows, dropt-out dewy rounded cliffs,
layer on layer—rock, cloud—
Snaky ridges wriggle the abyss mountain wall mist tatters,
cloud veil thins and peels,
a rush of water running down there rising—
Rose light leaping hill to hill—dark down gorges have no
end;
no bottom to the bottom.
Taiwan’s twenty million people
live below these mountain depths,
soaking cliffs and drippy elder trees.
c. 1995
Where the Sammamish, the Snohomish, and the Skykomish All Come In
The sweet insipid taste of salal
and the sharp sour Oregon grape
bland salmonberry
spit-bugs inside
grasshoppers under dry
Cowpies China pheasant flies up
broad white dogwood bloom
we tried smoking shredded cedarbark
bubbles of pitch in the bark
pull bracken ferns to throw like spears
cows, they
shit as they walk
plop plop
July–September 2005
What a life!
the single fly
in the spotless Forest Service
campground
toilet
Candle Creek, Oregon
c. September 2007
Excerpted from Gary Snyder: Collected Poems. Copyright (c) 2022 by Gary Snyder. Used by permission, Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y. All rights reserved.
Library of America GARY SNYDER: COLLECTED POEMS, BY GARY SNYDER
Gary Snyder is a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and a California native. He has published numerous books of poetry and prose, including Danger on Peaks (Counterpoint Press, 2005); The Gary Snyder Reader (1952-1998) (1999); Mountains and Rivers Without End (1997); No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1993), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; The Practice of the Wild (1990); Left Out in the Rain, New Poems 1947-1985; Axe Handles (1983), for which he received an American Book Award; Turtle Island (1974), which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; Regarding Wave (1970); and Myths & Texts (1960). Snyder has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Bollingen Prize, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize and the Levinson Prize from Poetry, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Times, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and the Shelley Memorial Award. Snyder was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2003. He was the recipient of the 2012 Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement by the Academy of American Poets.
