Susan Deer Cloud: Poem & Photography
The Way to Rainbow Mountain
by Susan Deer Cloud
Susan Deer Cloud, Shoreline, WA, July 1, 2022, photo by Phoebe Bosché
We saved the new year for finding our way
to Peru’s Rainbow Mountain . . . January 9th,
my roving companion John’s 69th birthday.
What better celebration than to seek that peak
of many colors concealed until four years ago,
climate change freeing the mountain’s
thick poncho of ice. Ever since I first saw
a picture of Vinicunca, “seven colored mountain,”
I dreamed in its direction, my heart beating
to whatever awaited me in Incan Andes,
my soul frozen by the Ice Age of loco
Estados Unidos, by all the hate and crazy
and then the breast cancer that hit two Mays ago.
Sí, I dreamed of ascending to Rainbow Mountain
and maybe thaw to the woman of color
I once was. Chile, Argentina, Bolivia,
lastly Peru . . . wandering through desert,
altiplano, along ocean and over cloud-touching
passes down into pueblos and cities looking
bombed out except in the turista areas, and John
on his birthday driving us ever higher on road
winding to the base camp of his birthday gift,
steep drops from crumbling dirt edges
reminding us why people pray to whatever gods
or goddesses they hope exist. How close we came
to plummeting off cliffs where vultures keep watch.
Then we made it to the trail’s beginning,
hail pelting down, mists like shape-shifters
swirling down a vast valley and snaking around
mountainsides. Two Indian guides led us up
on their horses, I in three layers of clothes
marveling at my guide seemingly gliding
in bare feet and sandals through hail stones,
patches of snow, puddles and streams. When
my mare, gentle and reddish brown, stopped,
the guide talked low and kind to her until we
continued on. John’s horse, a stallion, whinnied
and pranced sometimes while I patted my mare
on her neck as softly as the guide spoke. We had to
disembark and trudge up the final vertical of path.
Despite the Diamox I took, I could barely
breathe, feared I might have to crawl to reach
that place I needed to go. John grabbed
my hand, gripped it tight and helped pull me
to the mountaintop facing Rainbow Mountain,
the mirador, for no human was allowed to step on
the mineral-made sacred rainbow. I knelt
by a stone wall, refuge from winds 16,000 feet high,
gazed as llamas, alpacas, vicuñas, and descendants
of Incas gazed in their ur-language of silence.
“O beautiful holy Rainbow Mountain, we greet you
and we thank you.” And your “De nada”? Sun blazing
in to part the clouds, just as we met an indigenous family
celebrating their matriarch’s 60th birthday, everyone
in traditional clothes, grandmother vivid like the gift
of the Mountain. “Happy Birthday, Feliz Cumpleaños!”
We smiled, talked, laughed, took photographs
of each other, of our two Americas coming together,
warming me back to a woman of color.
Indigenous Family Near Rainbow Mountain, Peru, January 2019, photograph by Susan Deer Cloud
Feminismo Mural, Bolivia, 2019, photograph by Susan Deer Cloud
Susan Deer Cloud, a Catskill Native, is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, two New York State Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowships, and an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant. Published in numerous journals and anthologies, her most recent books are The Way to Rainbow Mountain (Shabda Press, 2019), Before Language (Shabda Press, 2016), and Hunger Moon: Poems (Shabda Press, 2014). She also edited the anthologies I Was Indian (Before Being Indian Was Cool), Volumes I & II (Foothills Publishing 2009, 2012). Currently Deer Cloud balances her life Libra-like between her mountain home and roving afar, her rambling naturally becoming an interior journey resulting in visions, stories, essays, and poems. For more: https://sites.google.com/site/susandeercloud/.