MALLORY ON EVEREST
 May, 1999
 
 
The man sees a dull whiteness in the ice,
something that doesn’t gleam like snow.
A hobnail boot half-emerges from the scree
and an ankle extends bare and brittle.
Yellowed shrapnel of bone
jags out of torn trousers: an ugly fracture.
The man fell hard.
 
His tattered shirt has ripped open
across a wind-polished back,
bleached and hardened by sun
and the mountain’s dry freeze,
its scapulas still articulate.                                                                                                     
Wind sweeps a body clean
seventy years here.
Nothing hides.
 
He lies face down,
thinning hair tousled and frozen.
Half-naked arms reach up
as if he were clasping the slope.
 
Kneeling beside the body,
the man takes off his mittens
and eases the collar
back from the neck,
his hands already so numb
the sweater’s frayed wool feels large
and vague in his fingers.
Stiff hair pricks his knuckles.
He’s caught up, finally, to the man
he’s followed so long in his mind,
and Mallory seems so nearly alive
that he wants to set the broken bone.

He fumbles clumsily with the frozen jacket—
snow goggles stuffed in a pocket:
it must have been dusk, then,
the glare fading off the ice
as he pushed back to camp:
he would have had time,
could have scaled the last pitch.
Or did he turn back
at the last sheer wall of ice
as storm clouds blew in
and swallowed the summit ridge?

He tries to cover Mallory’s bare arms
with the unraveling sweater
the climber’s wife knitted back in Surrey.
He can still feel the strength
of the dead man’s triceps
and thinks how Lytton Strachey
compared the body he’s found
to an athlete sculpted by Praxiteles.

When he finds the altimeter,
it’s cracked. It broke in the fall,
badly enough to keep him
from retrieving any record
of how high Mallory got.

If he holds it any longer
his fingers will freeze to the metal.
He seals it in a Ziploc bag.

He puts his mittens back on.
The rest of his team arrives
and they cover Mallory,
as gently as they can, with scree
so souvenir hunters won’t find him.

***

Author's Note

“Mallory on Everest” was inspired by photographs from the 1999 expedition that discovered George Mallory’s body on Everest. The body, preserved by the cold for over seventy years, was found just below the summit. Whether Mallory successfully climbed the mountain is still unknown. As I wrote it, I realized the poem was becoming about what is just out of reach—Mallory remains poised just below the summit he sought; the searcher finds the body he’s looking for but can’t know what actually happened to Mallory. There’s a way in which certain things need to remain unknowable—solving their mysteries would, in some sense, violate what makes them powerful. Or, rather, we can’t learn everything and remain alive—if the searcher stayed with the body he’d die.


Katherine Robinson grew up in Maryland, near Washington, DC. She graduated from Amherst College in 2008 with a BA in English. She is currently an MFA student at Johns Hopkins University, studying with Mary Jo Salter. Between degrees she worked at a wildlife sanctuary in the Shetland Islands and at the Folger Theater in Washington, DC.