Margaret Mackinnon: “Everett Ruess: Signs and Wonders”
EVERETT RUESS: SIGNS AND WONDERS
Everett Ruess was a young artist and writer who explored the High Sierra, the California coast, and the desert Southwest. In 1934, at age twenty, he disappeared while traveling through a remote area of Utah.
It was a simple story, really: a boy lost
to the wilderness, a boy who claimed
he lived regardless of everything
but beauty, a boy who said I was cold
and weary, but I kept my dream.
He asked his father once,
Can one ask too much of life? And the answer
came back, Yes, many do. And yet, the desert
held him in its hollowed light.
The world he knew was red cliffs, the trail’s
ascents and falls. The world he knew—
stones scraped clean by wind and time.
Darkness blooming in the canyon’s depths.
Twisted pine and juniper, the bones of hills.
And the smell of sage on a rare, wet day.
There’s no romance in the death of a boy—
still, Everett’s what he was and what
we’ve made of him. And what he was.
And was the end, when it came,
a dazzling surprise? Did he recognize
those last moments like something hovering
in the infinite air? Some have said
he may have seen the face of God—
at least a glimpse of it—
the way some have said what Moses saw
at Mount Karkom was a brilliant trick of light,
illumination on the year’s shortest day—
that angle of sun on a clear, cold morning,
something for them that was near enough—
something that almost flamed.
Margaret Mackinnon has had work appear in a range of journals, including Image, The American Journal of Poetry, Blackbird, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review. Her first book, The Invented Child, was awarded the Gerald Cable Book Award and the 2014 Literary Award in Poetry given by the Library of Virginia. A chapbook, Naming the Natural World, won the 2018 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review chapbook competition. Mackinnon’s new book, Afternoon in Cartago, won the 2021 Richard Snyder Memorial Prize and was published by Ashland Poetry Press.