Scaling the Ramparts (poem)

 --USAFA, 1970

                                       I

Poised half the way up the Rockies' east front range,

   we three toiled in a crowd of blue

suits, unmilitant militants in a melange

of would-be scholarly soldiers:  we trained our shoes

   to be  mirrors of our stoical face,

schooled our minds in how to bulletproof

our young bodies, measured our swift days in pacing

    punishments on a latticed terrazo,

and gave infinite care to out jackboot lacings.

Early to bed, early we rose to this martial piazza

   and marched, asleep, to a pre-dawn breakfast,

though praying first to a young warrior's gods;

and then off to class where benignant achitects

   of inhuman designs taught us the methods

of human erasure, pure, chaste, and delectable.

Late afternoons, our football became a bullet

   of innocent intent, a guided missile

for the fraternal strife of playing cadets.

Remote, in that high air, what could we tell

to those mountains about a distant shrapnel?

What could we know of the blooded ineffable?

                                     

                                      II

Three young, unthinking reeds--

fragile Swan, sinuous swimmer

in discontent; dumb Wise

who'd mindless aspire without intent;

and Tony Zap, pure mafioso

of his burnt-out, desirous bent--

frozen in the green of their spring year

find vision suddenly sprung upward,

up the ooming, overarching

Rampart Range and find as sudden

hearts beating up that steep

slope, the vertiginous slope climbing

eastward and up towards the pale sun,

and vine-like up they begin to creep.

                                       III

And so pointed our plod up that sliding slide of peak,

placed each foot, feeling grave fetters receding,

noted tough pines thinning, our streterous talk

blown up the balding slope, buoyant in rarified blue

of heaving ascent, and hefted to  communal hearts

onto granite crag, at last, and beheld the midget grace

of a world grown small below.

                                       IV

stone face mountain high--

we blow the reefer-mad spring

out over endless plains     

                                        V

      And then down

screeing. skiing down the slope

  from rock to branch

                  to rock and rock

      and rock, hairless

                  heads streaming back

         and up, pulsating         

brains

                            grinning

   at speed

                        and dopplering trees

only to come to rest

     at the still

                              point

where a contoured green

spawns the rectangular stone terrazo.

                                       VI

Down, down, we came from the crown of the granite tor,

remembering only the distancing green arc of plain

fading at dark--that Monday, we played at that war

once more, stepping through that and each following day

in  their dutiful succession; below, mendicant whores

sold everyday wares and politicos weighed and delayed.

   Each morning, the blue geometer of our faceless crowd

   spoke as one, and resounded over the muffling clouds.

                                       VII

Sundays, sirens wailed

somewhere else--under the sun-drench

of stained glass, we sat

quiet and cool, cowering

in the holy guise

of a religious innocence.