"Slowly Emerging from COVID, I Watch Mountaineering Documentaries" by Candice Kelsey

Slowly Emerging from COVID,
I Watch Mountaineering Documentaries

A climber’s reputation rests on how many times death is cheated while a summit’s reputation rests on how many ghosts it has acquired. More than 150 ghosts haunt Mt. Everest, Sagarmatha, Mother Goddess of Earth. Perhaps that is why I find myself watching The Wildest Dream, Beyond the Edge, and Touching the Void after emerging from my own Byzantine gamble with nature. Joseph Conrad called it fascination of the abomination: humanity’s mutual destination is the Death Zone, Everest’s Camp 6, where the body is dying, starved for oxygen, cannibalizing its own innards to generate heat.

We become our own ghost every day.

The void melts beyond dream into a mother’s touch.

If we are lucky enough to goddess ourselves back from the summit, we learn that loneliness— life’s oldest quarantine—awakens our primal ache to sit round a campfire, a dinner table, to be told a repertoire of jokes, to hear the history of the English language even. Modernity tucked this ache into bed, under the covers in a room with no windows and a million locked doors when we weren’t looking. Loneliness is contentment’s Sherpa, and tomorrow is my bivouac. Lord, let there be a change in weather.

Candice Kelsey

Candice Kelsey is in her 24th year of teaching and currently lives in Georgia. She serves as a creative writing mentor with PEN America's Prison & Justice Writing Program; her poetry appears in Poets Reading the News and Poet Lore among other journals. Candice's first collection, Still I am Pushing, explores mother-daughter relationships as well as toxic body messages. She won the Two Sisters Writing Contest, was chosen as a finalist in Cutthroat's Joy Harjo Prize, and has been nominated for a Best of the Net and two Pushcarts. Find her at @candicekelsey1 and www.candicemkelseypoet.com

Headshot: Leora Wright

Photo Credit: Staff