Dusk in the Canadian Rockies, 1898

I strongly identify with my Canadian background.  My grandmother on my mother's side was a Canadian national and our family originally immigrated to Nova Scotia from France in the 18th Century.  Northern Maine, where my family is from, is not very different from New Brunswick to the East and Quebec to the West.  This imagist poem, however, really owes a debt to Robert W. Service and the poem, The Heart of the Sourdough.  I once had an magazine advertisement for Yukon Jack posted above my desk . (I actually found this image from a site that is selling a copy of a poster of the ad - oh how I love the Internet!) To the left of the character in picture where quoted these lines from the Heart of the Sourdough:

"I have clinched and closed with the naked North, I have learned to defy and defend,
Shoulder to shoulder we have fought it out - yet the Wild must win in the end."

I loved that sentiment and tried to give my mental picture of that in this image in this poem.  I think that I was also thinking of Jeremiah Johnson. I wanted to convey the details, and the grandeur, but also the mounting concern of the character that they might lose the fight with nature and get caught out in the cold at night.  I have never been to the Canadian Rockies or mushed a sled dog, but hey, read Service's biography and you will find he wasn't the hard-bitten Klondiker we all imagine him to be either: doesn't detract from the poem. The spacing and punctuation in the poem are by design.

Mountains
    snow bound  purple coolness
Gurgling death-cold streams
  feed stands of naked aspens.
Desolate
                            splendor.


Sledding through this pass
steep  snow-misty mountains
Drink
   this cold and bitter wind that has
 flown across the plains of snow.
It brushes silver spangles into 
          your buffalo robe.


Low  golden sun       half-eaten
  by the western  mountains  casts
Giant candle shows   with the rocky crags
Their silhouettes
                           arch across the pass.
Winter night soon upon us
        and the dogs heave at their traces
 eager to make camp and wolf their
                                                       frozen fish.


Go  Malamute  the frost lurks
                                                at our heels.
And the moon is dark tonight.