The Ethics of Writing on George Mallory
BY RUTH COOLIDGE
Should I be a romantic,
or a realist?
Shall I let him lie, white,
clinging tight to the scree-side;
dare I drag him back, half-
hollow to bottom?
I could fresco his bones
to the Earth’s great ceiling,
scatter the dust of his heart
from the white pointed peak.
But how can I know the chords
in his crystallizing mind
as he took one look up
the Second Step?
Mallory—
you are not my stone to turn
over nor my corpse
to question.
But I will keep your compass
in my rash, intrusive heart.
Forgive me this as Everest’s
holy snows release you
to bone, rope, cold.
KNIFE TOILET
Deurali, Kaski District, Nepal
What’s poetry but a spasming light cast on blue snow
each strobe flash the blink of a sleepy generator’s eye?
“Time for bed now” but how can we sleep beside literature
unprobed, the knife lying coyly on the back of the toilet?
We stand unmade in the light shot from the stall, the door
jamb framing the knife toilet like a sacred painting.
This snow-sunk outpost harbors secret truth—
come for the mountains, stay for the knife toilet.
No sense living this far from chickens and fighting dogs but
for the promise of the unseen, the snow-clogged mountain
or the treasure we imagine in the plumbing.
The knife toilet becomes our Annapurna.
Wandering ends here, where the fixed line from eye to
brain snaps and we plummet to the heart’s crevasse.
The knife toilet makes us nine in one, roped and fumbling
in the dark even as we lie warm under musty bedrolls.
Who could have known that this far up the valley soul
collects like snow in drifts and weighs more in the thinning air?
For every ounce in the pipeline there’s a pound out here.
Call it waste, call it treasure—in the end, it’s thoroughly human.