We'd recommend them to anyone—

As nice, but pricy (which is a lie)—

Took our breakfast on the Lowes'

Ephesian patio by that pool Mr. Lowe

Disguised as a pond, which was cerulean

And imaginary, tickling our prostrate appetites—

Naturally dormant after those hours,

They seemed like eons, of untroubled slumber

In the steady susurruration and aroma

Of evening rain, which everywhere

Is distinct as love, flying, crawling things

Testing our fragile window screens

For access, and then achieving it! our cabin's

Interior heavy with the concussive

After-smell and taste of mouse—their exquisite

Piss and caraway turds—priming our languid

Appetites with mimosas from the hands

Of Mrs. Lowe herself—she squeezed the citrus,

Poured champagne into crystal flutes she ensured

Were frosted, all while munching modestly

On a wiener leftover from last night's

Lowe's family reunion, prudently

Conducted in Mr. Lowe's three vacated

Automobile bays due to a sustained

And astounding mountain deluge, kids

Running around in the rain, vying to see

Who could get their t-shirts most wet,

Eight-year-old lads egging on

The twelve-year-old lassies—no wonder

We saw so many little Lowes!—

Washing down her scarlet frank

With an orange soda of yet another

Amazing hue, wild as a bird

Or a red-haired woman, which

Sustained her interest in a filtertip

Cigarette—a Marlboro, named for a London

Street named after an early Churchill—

Remarkable so many young nubile women

Had thronged to Randolph to brave

The morning sun with goose and other

Bumps, nipples like thimbles, wearing a virtual

Kaleidoscope of tiny bikinis so perilously

Close to stinging or grossly furred

And clawed assailants whose home

Was the encroaching White Mountain—

Ouch, ouch! And whack!—those thongs belonged

In Rio, but maybe the women were mule deer,

Or the white-tailed hinds adored by Jupiter

And companions to Diana, goddess of virgins

And the yearning moon—it was full,

And nominally blue, two shining this July—

Slipping from between the highland village's

Pine and fir, up from poplar and silver birch

Below, or out from behind Mr. Lowe's

Crayola ochre school bus parked athwart

The old highway west which crossed

Lowe family lands and the asphalt-gravel plains

Surrounding his garage, not to frustrate

Vacation home owners who summer-hiked

And winter snowshoed down the road,

Sometimes too snooty to shop at his store,

Lock elbows with a ship's knees, leap

On board and Support Our Troops!

But to protect the reckless children

Of Randolph's soaked, smouldering

Bacchante at Lowe's midsummer night's

Dance around the gas pumps—O flying, crimson horse,

Sustain me!—held despite the thud of last night's

Cloudburst—so out came tender-hided Cervidae

Mulieris to test their reflections in the waters

Of Lowe's cabins and pond-pool in a full

Spectrum oil mirage amid swaying palms

Mr. Lowe had shrewdly imported and planted

In sand renewed annually by caravans

Of trucks to Randolph, though first from islands

Scattered across Caribbeans seas on ships

That flew, with no apologies, the Jolly Roger!

Kenneth Rosen is the author of seven collections of poems, beginning with Whole Horse (Braziller Poetry Series, 1970), and most recently The Origins of Tragedy (CavanKerry, 2002). Rosen hiked the length of the Presidential Range of the White Mountains over thirty years ago, and was particularly charmed to discover Crag Camp at timberline on the edge of King Ravine, after hiking in a dark hallucinatory rain over black rocks intermittently marked with yellow blazes from Monroe Hut past Thunderhole Junction and down Mt. Adams to Crag Camp's lone gaslight twinkling ambiguously from beyond the gathering shoulder-high pines. Rosen and his wife returned to Randolph, NH on July 31st, 2004, night of the blue moon and a downpour extrordinaire — the northern summits rip the stomachs from slow-moving, low-lying clouds — so that he could review the logbooks maintained at Crag Camp, now in the custody of the Randolph Mountain Club archivist, particularly the entrees made in behalf of G.A.S. (Goddard Alpine Society), by the pseudonymous Grey Dellwood and friends, gnomic meditations on the cultural alternatives represented by military service in Viet Nam and psychedelic self-indulgence in the mountains. This was the era when a song such as "Coming Down Again" (from GOATS HEAD SOUP) magically refracted one's most private erotic, psychic, and geo-physical exigencies, the communion of chaos and ataraxia made popular, in an old-fashioned sense, by substances known variously as Orange Sunshine, Purple Windowpane, ad infinitum. Rosen and his wife endeavored to sojourn at the cabin described in the poem — checking it twice, to see if there'd been some mistake — but eventually Rosen's wife seized the bull, as it were, by the horns, and explained to its sturdy country proprietors, how the cabin would not be meeting their needs—Rosen, at that point, in the passenger seat, judiciously slouched below windshield level, his wife, of course, returning to their car to do the driving.

When your head is in the highlands
All other hearts are desert islands, etc.