Pilgrimage, by Susan Auerbach

Stone 27, installation at Burning Man, Black Rock City, NV, by Benjamin Langholz (USA) 2019. Click on image for more visuals of this installation.

Pilgrimage
                                                                                                                                                            
You bump on beater bikes over miles
of dry lake bed, past the Man and the Temple
and roving throbbing art cars into deep playa. 
Far off in the dust, a vertical ring 
of floating stones like a relic of ancient rites. 
 
You come upon it then, an elliptical staircase. 
Twenty-seven rough-hewn sand-toned boulders, 
each the weight of four men, suspended
from looming columns by a ship’s rigging
of cables. Through the wires, wedges of cloud
and mountain. Light, air, and earth, the frame. 
Stepping into it like entering a grove of redwoods. 
 
If you’re bold, you scramble up and over
the twenty-foot peak; you can’t help grinning. 
If you’re old like me, you try five giant steps 
till the wobble defeats you. Like at six 
on roller skates: dread had already breached 
my bones. How many exhilarations 
did I miss? But I wouldn’t miss this. 
Hello new planet! 
 
I stroke the sun-warmed stone like an amulet, 
pray that nobody falls. Gaze down at rock piles 
that hide the hardware. It took three engineers 
and heavy equipment to anchor 
my son’s vision, make it soar. 
 
A pilgrim, I visit day and night. At noon,
it throws down a shadow on the desert
floor like a fat pearl necklace. At dusk, 
it’s swarmed by revelers, their billowing 
scarves and sarongs the only colour. 
One morning, I bask in its stillness,
then spot four legs dangling from the top.
I settle on the first stone, turn to the sun.
 
Susan Auerbach

Susan Auerbach is a retired professor of education who returned in midlife to her first love of creative writing. She often writes in the key of grief, as in her chapbook, In the Mourning Grove (forthcoming from Finishing Line Press). Her poems have appeared in Spillway, Gyroscope Review, Greensboro Review, and other journals, and in her memoir, I’ll Write Your Name on Every Beach: A Mother’s Quest for Comfort, Courage & Clarity After Suicide Loss (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2017). She lives with her husband, dog, and seven chickens in Altadena, CA, where she takes inspiration from the San Gabriel Mountains.