The Summer Before My Son Leaves for College
Rocky Mountain National Park, Estes Park, Colorado
I come from a sea-level civilization.
We lived in tune with the ocean’s rhythms;
for hundreds of years my people
never sought higher ground, but today
my son and I step over rocks, finger
their formations to balance, to propel
our bodies further up the mountain
to Emerald Lake, a body of water bordered
by a mountain range and a waterfall
as tall as any building in the small
city where we live. At home,
the altimeter reads 1 ft. by our front door,
7 ft. from a friend’s balcony, and -20, somehow,
on I-95. On this trail, we start our climb at 5,000 ft.
Our minds grow still as the climb grows steep.
Oxygen-thinned, we stop to take an extra breath,
to contemplate the chipmunk squatting on a rock,
to honor one dramatic mountain pass after another.
Words run dry—each time we pass a vista,
we shake our heads; it’s too much,
the grandeur, the height of the mountains,
even our exertion, our reaching.
As air attenuates, thoughts part, company parts.
With every step, I feel us setting down
the things we carried for each other
for 18 years like stones.
Who was the son I thought I could raise?
Who was the mother he hoped I would be?
The sky turns light as we take in our final view—
a lake of clear water circled by jagged, snow-dotted peaks,
rivers of sunlight breaking through cloud cover,
a sheath of water cascading over the mountainside
feeding the lake—a landscape shaped by gravity
and time. At 10,000 ft, we begin to descend,
to lower our bodies toward the ocean.
I have done all I could. He is almost free.
We lived in tune with the ocean’s rhythms;
for hundreds of years my people
never sought higher ground, but today
my son and I step over rocks, finger
their formations to balance, to propel
our bodies further up the mountain
to Emerald Lake, a body of water bordered
by a mountain range and a waterfall
as tall as any building in the small
city where we live. At home,
the altimeter reads 1 ft. by our front door,
7 ft. from a friend’s balcony, and -20, somehow,
on I-95. On this trail, we start our climb at 5,000 ft.
Our minds grow still as the climb grows steep.
Oxygen-thinned, we stop to take an extra breath,
to contemplate the chipmunk squatting on a rock,
to honor one dramatic mountain pass after another.
Words run dry—each time we pass a vista,
we shake our heads; it’s too much,
the grandeur, the height of the mountains,
even our exertion, our reaching.
As air attenuates, thoughts part, company parts.
With every step, I feel us setting down
the things we carried for each other
for 18 years like stones.
Who was the son I thought I could raise?
Who was the mother he hoped I would be?
The sky turns light as we take in our final view—
a lake of clear water circled by jagged, snow-dotted peaks,
rivers of sunlight breaking through cloud cover,
a sheath of water cascading over the mountainside
feeding the lake—a landscape shaped by gravity
and time. At 10,000 ft, we begin to descend,
to lower our bodies toward the ocean.
I have done all I could. He is almost free.
Catherine Esposito Prescott is the author of the chapbooks Maria Sings and The Living Ruin. Recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Green Mountains Review Online, NELLE, Northwest Review, Pleiades, Spillway, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Verse Daily, The Orison Anthology, and Grabbed: Writers Respond to Sexual Assault. Co-founder of SWWIM and Editor in Chief of SWWIM Every Day, Prescott received an MFA from New York University. She teaches vinyasa yoga and yoga philosophy in Miami, where she lives with her family.
Art: Grapefruit, oil on paper, Paulina Swietliczko