Poems of Yosemite by Charles Weeden

Poems of Yosemite is a collection of poems written over a fifty-year period of living and hiking in the High Sierra. These poems reflect the mountains as the Yosemite’s polished granite reflects the light. In “Shadow Lake,” the author remembers resting on the same rocks as he had forty years before, “what distance from same place, what sameness with distant self?” And as he sees the missing “mystic moiety” of Half Dome reflected in Mirror Lake, he too sees, “my unhalf-those thoughts unthought and that life unlived.” Though the mountains remain unchanged, the life reflected by them does. Yosemite is Weeden’s touchstone for, “the distance traveled.”