Kiki Petrosino's "To Think of Italy While Climbing the Saunders-Monticello Trail"

Thoughts on mountains.

To Think of Italy While Climbing the Saunders-Monticello Trail

Albemarle, Virginia


*

two Piedmonts nearly
        touch across green water

I watch my hands fill up
        with wilderness

*

these mountains have given us
        so much & we

will not even give ourselves
        to each other



from You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World (Milkweed Editions, 2024)

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This short poem is one of the final poems in an anthology edited by Ada Limón, You Are Here. It is also a poem that exists in conversation with much of Kiki Petrosino’s work, as one of her books, White Blood, navigates the legacy of slavery and wealth and power and so much else in the state of Virginia, where today’s poem is set.

In an essay that details the thought process behind the creation of that book, Petrosino writes:

In this room, I’m about to write a new poem.

My hands pause over my keyboard. This is the moment of greatest mystery in the writing process, when the mind confronts a blank screen. The heartbeat slows, and the body waits.

My poem is about Virginia. It’s the place where America began, but it’s also a place without a single beginning. Virginia contains and excludes. It contradicts itself. The language I must find for this poem will have to be strong enough to carry many conflicting stories, and light enough to witness without adding weight.

What is the right word, in English, to describe these countless worlds, the wilderness of beginnings and endings? Too many to be contained by any singular I.

At last, I lift my hands to type:

We.

You can see that work at play in today’s poem, whose opening lines center the singular I and whose closing lines turn toward the collective we. It’s a seemingly small movement, but it feels remarkable given the context and setting of the poem — a trail climbing to a mansion built by slave labor. There is something about turning to the we that feels generous in such a moment. Unbelievably so. In all that space between the poem’s first four lines and its final four lines, there is a pause to consider, I think. And in that pause, Petrosino includes us. I feel her thinking. Considering. Wondering. And then I read it: we. In a space of contradiction and brutality and violence, Petrosino asks for more from us. And for us.

In her poem “The Shops at Monticello,” Petrosino writes:

I’m a black body in this Commonwealth, which turned black bodies
into money. Now, I have money to spend on little trinkets to remind me

of this fact. I’m a money machine & my body constitutes the common
wealth. I spend & spend in order to support this. I support this mountain

with my black money. Strange mountain in late boom. Strange mansion
built on mountains of wealth. 

Here, Petrosino centers her lived experience — the singular I — to turn us, as readers, toward the collective cycle of exploitation and consumption that feeds upon so many people. In this poem, the singular I does a similar kind of work as the collective we. It models for us a way to think about our own complicity amidst the awful aims of power and capital. This I is generous in the same way that the aforementioned we is generous. It says I can think about my own contradictions. Like any good teacher, Petrosino does the hard, difficult, introspective work her poems ask us to do ourselves.

I was drawn to this poem today because I love thinking about mountains. In that poem I just mentioned, Petrosino writes: “Strange mountain.” I think this is because the mountain does not judge; it simply is. It must be strange to be a mountain. To feel our presence, and to feel it — in some ways — so awfully. Upon such mountains, we live and destroy and prey and are preyed upon.

When I read these lines from today’s poem, I felt my breath catch:

these mountains have given us
        so much & we

will not even give ourselves
        to each other

Such lines feel striking both in the context of today’s poem and in the context of our world. Within the setting of today’s poem, atop a small mountain where someone built their mansion through the unpaid, degrading, painful work of slaves, Petrosino’s choice of words — given, give — push against a history of exploitation, where people are bought and sold and owned. There’s a language of generosity offered here, in a place where there is a history of generosity’s opposite.

And, too, there is a language of generosity offered here that we would do well to consider in every context.

What made these lines so striking for me was the fact that I had never considered such language — these mountains have given me — in the midst of the moments when I have felt wordless, awe-struck, and full of wonder. Getting off a plane in Denver and seeing the Rocky Mountains catching the sun’s last light on their snow-covered peaks. Driving near Estes Park and feeling the gulch road snake its way out of a canyon into the thin air, only to notice the view widening, allowing me to glimpse Longs Peak touching the sun with its serrated blade of ages-old rock. Running up Mount Washington’s auto road to find my dad waiting for me at the summit in winds that bent me sideways, the fact of nature so severe and so wild that we couldn’t help but laugh. In those moments, I don’t think I ever thought that I was being given the joy of such experience. If I did, I might have cherished them more. I do cherish them. I do. But to be given something? When that happens? It makes you say thank you. It’s the first thing you say. Thank you.

I think that I am also thinking of mountains because — and here, I am taking a bit of a turn, a touch of digression, if you’ll allow, and if you’ll perhaps be willing to follow me down this road — I am an avid professional cycling fan. It is almost certainly my favorite sport. And recently, the Giro d’Italia just finished — basically the Tour de France of Italy. Most of these big, multi-week stage races end with what’s called a “Queen Stage” — the most difficult day of racing over the course of three weeks, usually only a stage or two before the race’s final stage. At this year’s Giro, the “Queen Stage” included a climb up the Colle delle Finestre, a mountain pass that tops out above 7,000 feet, and includes, after the paved tarmac ends, miles of switchbacked gravel roads that snake their way to the summit.

I live for watching these stages. I wake up early and make my coffee and feel transported. Such stages are wildly entertaining. And stunning. And beautiful. All at the same time. What I love especially is that, as the cyclists climb these hour-long alpine ascents, and as they get closer and closer to the top, the crowds grow larger. Funny, right? This year, the top of the Finestre looked like this:

visualsofharry

A post shared by @visualsofharry

Come on now! All those thousands of people woke in the predawn light and cycled up that massive climb on janky mountain bikes or road bikes or decades-old single speeds early in the morning, and they stood there — shrouded in fog and mist, feet planted next to melting snow — for hours, just to see about a hundred guys on bikes grimace their way up the last kilometer of a climb that was nearly twenty kilometers. Or they drove camper vans up to the summit in the week prior and spent a few days drinking wine on the peak, the clouds moving through bodies huddled in the joy that comes with anticipation.

In cycling, people often say that climbs are the great equalizers. That they are the true tests of individual power, since riders are going slow enough that they cannot benefit greatly from the draft that comes from sitting behind another rider, and since — as a result of the gradient — there really is a sense that you are carrying yourself up the mountain. This is true, yes. But the more I watch cycling, the more I realize that teams (and yes, there are teams), having acknowledged this fact, try to do whatever they can to support individual riders climbing up these mountains. Just this year, on this stage, the rider who ended up winning the entire race had a teammate who sent himself way up in the breakaway early in the stage, so many miles before this aching giant of a climb, just so that he could summit the mountain before his teammate, and support him on the way down, allow him to sit in his draft. In the valley after the climb, he pulled and pulled his teammate toward the finish line, his face absolutely straining with the effort, until he couldn’t do it anymore, and he became a heaving, slowing mess of a man gasping for air on the side of an Italian road somewhere near the Alps. He became the fact of a standstill. A statue. His teammate — the one he climbed ahead of just so he could go on to support him in the valley — won the Giro that day.

Sports, I know, are mere metaphors that sometimes overshadow or deflect us from the realities of our existence here on earth. Yes. Sure. I know that. But I get weepy sometimes — yes, I’ll admit it — thinking of some of these moments in cycling. I think this is because of so much: the vistas, the views, the faces of suffering, the fans who must climb the mountains, too, if they want to see their heroes. But I think, especially, it is because I don’t find many models of such profound, though metaphoric, acts in the more popular sports I watch in America. I think of football — which I do watch — and how it is bruising and violent, and how the headlights of the stadium are permanently affixed on a single rectangle upon which the action happens. There is regulation, and measurement, and certainty. There is little fluidity, and little interaction with the land. When I watch cycling, I don’t think what powerful people we are, so primed for conquest. No. When I watch these men twirl their legs around and around on funny, though beautiful, machines, ascending mountains that are older than human history, I think of how small we are, and how humble we must be in the midst of all this massiveness and majesty. How we must measure our efforts. How we must understand how limited we are.

And you know what? Petrosino mentions the Piedmonts in today’s poem. Monticello sits within the Piedmont region of Virginia — a hilly, rolling land of green that rolls right into the Blue Ridge Mountains. And that climb I just mentioned? The Colle delle Finestre? It is in the Piedmont region of Italy.

The two Piedmonts that this poem alludes to are separated by green oceans and blue oceans and so many thousands of miles. But they are close together when considered in a different scale. Such a scale reminds us that our distances from one another, though sometimes great, can be considered intimate when viewed in a different light. This act of viewing in a different light; this act of consideration — this, I think, is part of the work that poetry offers us, and it is part of work that is required of us if we are to imagine a world of solidarity rather than polarized exploitation. The truth is that we are as close as we can imagine ourselves to be. But we must be the ones to do such imagining, and, after having imagined our closeness, we must remind ourselves of it again and again.

There is something here about perspective, if we are willing to think about it. Something here about what we are willing to look for in our world, and what we aren’t. A mountain affords us so much. A summit. A view. An understanding of time. But it only affords us what we are willing to look for, and what we are willing to look at. If we climb a mountain only to conquer it, then such conquering becomes the basis for our lives. But if we climb it to support someone else in their effort, then such support becomes the basis of our lives. Or if we climb it to say thank you, then such generosity becomes the basis for our lives. We have a choice, I know now, in how we look at and move amidst this world that is given to us. It is less, I know now, about how we shape this world that is incomprehensibly older than us. It is more about how we are shaped by it, and how we acknowledge both the world’s and each other’s efforts in shaping us. We say thank you. We say do you need help. We say wow. We say look at what we have been given. We say what can I give you.

I think of one of the great sentences ever written, by John McPhee, from Annals of a Former World:

If by some fiat I had to restrict all this writing to one sentence, this is the one I would choose: The summit of Mt. Everest is marine limestone.

As in: what once was at the bottom of the world is now at the top. As in: what is now at the top will one day be at the bottom. As in: this geologic scale is beyond our comprehension, but maybe not beyond our imagination. As in: we would do well, perhaps, to think about one another in the midst of all of this.

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Some notes:

1. My novel, Pilgrims, has a cover, a release date, and a preorder link. It’ll be out November 18th. You can preorder it here. And the cover is below. For all of this, I am wildly grateful. This novel, which tells a story of monks and brothers and dogs and bread-makers and long roads, feels like a big chunk of myself. And I’d be honored if you read it.

2. Annie Dorsen put together a spreadsheet of presses, organizations, and other institutions of the arts who have been affected by the loss of NEA funding. Here’s a helpful guide for how to support small and independent presses who have lost their funding, put together by Deep Vellum Books.

3. Here is a website — put together by volunteers — that tracks the jobs lost and lives affected by the de-funding of USAID. It’s worth reading in order to fully understand the severity of what is happening, who it is affecting, and how to help.

4. I have found that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing great work in building solidarity and awareness and justice in this contemporary moment. You can find a list of their resources and areas of further support here.

5. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

6. If you live in NYC, I have found Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor to be inspiring and empowering. You can find ways to support his campaign or get information about it here.

7. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.