TWO POEMS: CAMERON AVESON

After Work in LeConte Canyon The mail still hasn’t come. Neither have the pry bars, the rock drill, the hammers or the powder. Two weeks of watching the latrine fill and the food disappear. Fourteen days since they turned around and left, assuring us of their return, their boxes brimming under the canvas and leather. The mules will labor, wishing, like me, that they were already here; the packer pulling them across the thirty miles of hard granite between us, over the passes and down into the canyon. I roll another Bali Shag, lick the glue, light the end and inhale, my nerves twittering as the chemicals bustle through the polluted streets of my veins. Will she have written? And what? My lips pull at the paper, the nicotine skipping like a mischievous child through dim-lit alleys. I look down canyon, hoping the mules are moving toward me in the fading light, visions of them, still standing in the corrals, their tails flicking flies off each other, hooves pushing into piles of their own shit.

Clearing a Rockslide on Mather Pass It’s the sound: the speed of it, the rattle and reflection of it as it shimmers between quartz and silica. The sound sliding into unseen seams and expanding, revealing distance. The sound shatters and hurls as the explosion unfolds, the consequences careening past me. The sound shaking it all to pieces then leaving. She will want to know what happened. What to say? If the universe banged and no one was around to hear it? Billions of light years in retrospect and she gets hung up on the last millisecond, the space between the Big and the Bang. The beginning? I knelt on granite, grounding myself before I grabbed the blasting cap, my breath held. I inserted it into the detonating cord. Even the wind paused. Then it began; the sound, vibrating through mind and muscle, through wire, cap and cord, down into the hold, where the powder was already silently moving its mouth and dreaming of escape.

Cameron Aveson is currently a seasonal trail worker with the National Park Service in Kings Canyon National Park where he spends months living out of a backpack, miles from the end of the road in the Sierra Nevada mountains. He’s also a full time student at CSU Fresno where he spends months living out of a backpack, miles from the edge of the mountains, in a classroom, in the San Joaquin valley. Sometimes he lives in both places at the same time.