Bristlecone in Blue
Ascending takes effort.
My hamstrings protest; dizzy spells,
a cold sharp ache coiling in my ears,
my mind like an open door— all the flies let in,
the bodies below, still
waiting on warm asphalt.
There seems no good reason to climb
mountains anymore.
We left our grieving city, the sound of
trauma still audible
beneath our heavy sips of air
switchback after switchback, then higher still
the silence first like a murder then solvent.
My heart blooms suddenly—the delinquency
of being alive.
We rest at Ponderosa, inhale
sun-baked butterscotch
from its bark, the sweetness, an infidelity.
The dead still stand here centuries later.
The canyon bursts open a boneyard of bristlecone
in blue, the sky so certain—
gnarled trunks support branches, poised
petrified lightening, limbs
held up in terror
and surrender.
Wind-carved fissures filled with termite families
burrow and devour history,
because the earth won’t waste one single thread.
Quiet is a tender animal at our feet, a helix
of sorrow and prayer held in the den of its mouth.
There is nothing here to discover;
when we reach Raintree,
the oldest living thing in Nevada,
we are finally far enough away to be seduced
by hope.
The 3,000 year old tree is neither boastful nor glum.
Beneath a heap of roots, thick as thighs, it forges
soil, tangled by time into braided bark.
It forks turbulent winds through waxy needles,
It asks us to unbutton our souls—
Carnage is compost here,
a harvest for those breathless and bruised.
at 10,000 feet, the air is too thin
to remember how we swore we couldn’t go on.
Jennifer Battisti, a Las Vegas native, studied creative writing at the College of Southern Nevada. Her work has appeared in the anthology Legs of Tumbleweed, Wings of Lace, as well as in Desert Companion, Minerva Rising, Helen: a Literary Magazine, Red Rock Review, Citron Review, and elsewhere. She is the workshop facilitator for the Las Vegas Poetry Organization. Her debut chapbook, Echo Bay, is forthcoming in 2018.