Rocked by the Infinite

By: Erik Rittenberry

Photo: Erik Rittenberry

“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape — the loneliness of it; the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.”

—Andrew Wyeth

Serenity, mountains, and waterfalls, 
moonlight nightingales, an old cabin 
on a spruce-shadowed lake, a 
wood-burning stove, coffee 
and poetry, rusty lanterns 
and smoke-filled chimneys, the vivid leaves 
dripping like rain from the eaves as a 
cold wind prophesizes through 
the pines.

I’m here, alone. Far from the charade 
of a fabricated world that keeps us
chained to the profane. Far from
the abominable pandemonium of 
progress and production and the 
prosaic haste of our times.

The summer had fallen away like 
a dead leaf from an old elm. I voyaged north
into the womb of a distant wilderness, 
tucked back into the bowers of
the sublime. There is 
another world in which we’re all 
seeking and it is here—
in this solitude, 
in this seclusion, 
in this lucid silence. 

Late fall. Moonlight vespers. 
The fragrance of firewood mingled 
with the breath of the woodlands 
revives a forgotten song.  
Pride and ego vanish. No one knows
my name. There are no clocks,
time here is a mockery. 

In the window of my forlorn cabin, a candle burns 
and the lanterns sway on a midnight branch 
somewhere out there in the dark, 
you can hear the timeless ache 
of a million nights. 

I'm somewhere deep in the 
great state of Maine
gazing up at the snow peaks of 
Mount Katahdin, its highest mountain, 
the same rugged and unspoiled land 
that Thoreau wandered through over 
a century ago. I have his journals 
tucked into my old olive pack 
along with the poetry of Kunitz
and Roethke.  

“In a dark time, the eye begins to see, 
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; 
I hear my echo in the echoing wood —”

In the morning I set off in the surreal silence,
the cold wind in my face, muddy boots
and a thermos of coffee, 
my spirit as free as an uncaged raven. 
The moist crimson leaves I step upon 
will soon be choked and smothered 
by a winter snow. The trees will 
become disrobed and this vibrant landscape 
will develop into an achromatic
scene to tomorrow's eye.

Hours upon hours of trudging along 
on the sinuous trails of a late fall 
wonderland, I can’t help but reflect 
on how our ancestors once took part
in the world, how they wandered 
and toiled daily in the alcove of a forsaken 
hinterland, endowed with a universal kinship 
and a tremendous reverence for all of 
creation, reveling in the mysteries and mysticism 
of the vast cosmos, enriched with a divine 
connection that we moderns seem
to have been torn from. 

Worn and haggard with my legs bruised
and battered, I return to my old cabin 
that sits among the spruce, birch, and soft maples 
on a stone-lined shore of an ancient 
lake where a heavy mist hovers like 
an iridescent apparition before my eyes. 
Poised, I sit, on the front porch with a jug 
of red wine that warms the blood,
eavesdropping on the wisdom echoed 
in the stillness, awaiting the night 
hours with a sweet forlornness.

In this sacred severance, far from the convulsion
of crowds and the comfort and constraints of 
civilization, I sit here on the ebbing tide of the 
hazy shore of life, the haunting sound of 
the almost bare trees trembling in the 
wayward wind, the piercing verse 
of a dead poet takes hold: 

Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn't matter
which way was home;
as if he didn't know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever

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