A couple of summers ago, I was hiking up
through northern England.
And just had a backpack and would walk all day
and spend the night at a farmhouse or a little country
club.
It's much nicer to walk when you can have a pub at the end of it
instead of an empty campsite or something.
But I was hiking one day.
I was climbing a mountain called Great Shunner Fell.
In northern England, the mountains are called fells.
They have a different terminology.
Mountains are fells, valleys are dales, streams are becks.
Until you get to Northumberland and then they become burns.
Lakes are tarns, until you get to Northumberland
and then they become becks, no lochs.
Anyway, I was climbing this mountain
and I stopped for lunch.
And I was eating a piece of cheese or something
and I touched a lump inside my cheek
that hadn't been there that morning.
And my first thought was, will I get home before it happens.
Almost every poet I know is a hypochondriac.
I was in Peter Wild's class yesterday
and I was talking about that and I asked him
if he was a hypochondriac.
He said, no no I'm not a hypochondriac, very healthy.
And then I talked about one of my big hangups is my appendix.
When I'm way out in the wilderness,
I'm going to have appendicitis.
And all of a sudden he jumped up and said, I have that too.
Yes, my appendix does that, it's mine too.
Anyway, this poem was written in a doctor's office
in a little town in Northern England.
I'd been sitting there all morning
listening to all the stories.
The people comparing this new doctor with the old doctor
and I was looking at the cows outside the window.
And I kind of-- all the previous afternoon
I kind of wept bravely to myself going down the other side
of the mountain, you know.
"On Great Shunner Fell."
My last summer and it's going.
Past the longest day and growing shorter.
Her hair is yellow and will be growing.
Ravens here at night and gulls by day.
No surrogate to say goodbye.
I will go home across the northern sea this summer.
Knowing that, an anodyne and how the wind blows from the west
and how her yellow hair.
My last summer and it's going.
The cotton flowers and saxifrage where I am now.