Philip Connors finds poetic solace in 'the mountain knows the mountain'

For 14 straight years, beginning in 2002, Philip Connors was a fire lookout in the Gila Wilderness.

What would have been his 15th consecutive fire season was canceled by hip surgeries and their effect on him.

“I couldn’t read for one year. I had chronic pain, and it destroyed my attention span,” Connors said in a phone interview.

“A friend of mine, knowing I was having a kind of crisis physically and otherwise, sent me a book of haiku.”

The friend suggested that reading haiku — a traditional Japanese poem of three lines — would be easier for Connors to manage than reading longer works of literature.

“It was such a kind thing to do. Thoughtful on her part. And it worked,” Connors said. “I sat down and started reading haiku. And I loved it so much, I started writing haiku.”

As his health improved, he learned about haibun, a longer, prose-like Japanese literary form that has sometimes been joined with haiku.

Connors’ own writing of haibun and haiku — and his explanations of the history of the forms — are enjoyably on display in his new book, “the mountain knows the mountain: a fire watch diary.”

It contains his diary for the 2018 fire season, the year he returned to the same mountain after his absence.

Most of his haiku and haibun are sprinkled throughout the book as standalone poems and are not fused. Apart from the haiku and haibun, Connors’ diary writing is in its own way richly lyrical and poetic.

Here are some examples of Connors’ original haiku that reflect his respect for the Gila Wilderness and its creatures, his penchant for word play and his sense of humor.

This is his first haiku in the book:

“craving solitude

life with my head in the clouds

voila fire lookout”

Connors had wintered in El Paso. He wrote that he loved its people but rejected the noise of border-surveillance helicopters and the oil refinery-producing air pollution. He lives in Hillsboro.

Here’s a Connors haiku commenting on urban life and a caged animal who otherwise might be living free in the wilderness:

“unfit for cities

allergic to life indoors

a bear in a zoo”

This is a haiku that shows Connors being thankful by being watchful:

“awoke feeling sad

listened to the hermit thrush

& was sad no more”

The July chapter opens with his welcome to forest creatures. The first salamander of the season peeked from its hole in the morning. The first rufous hummingbird arrived at the feeder in the afternoon. And a great horned owl visited the meadow at twilight.

“… the day kept getting more abundant in its gifts …” he writes.

The book is divided by chapters named for the months Connors is on watch— April through August.

The chapter on April closes with a 30-line prose-poem that may be haibun.

The second half reads:

“… but I know the spring

on the north face

where the mountain weeps

sweet tears of joy

at the coming of summer,

snowmelt filtered

through the roots

of grasses and forbs

and tender young aspens,

tickled on its trickle

through earth,

flavor clean as laughter,

mouthfeel that of mirth,

though I’m told

I anthropomorphize,

for whatever that’s worth.”

Connors isn’t the only human voice in the book. His wife, Mónica Ortiz Uribe, and a publisher-friend Bobby Byrd from El Paso (who has since died) relate their observations during separate visits to the mountain.

Connors said he’s grateful to University of New Mexico Press, the publisher of “the mountain knows the mountain,” for its enthusiasm for the book and making it “a beautiful object. It’s well-presented visually. That’s important to me.”

“The mountain knows the mountain” is Connors’ fourth book. He also wrote “Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout,” which won the 2011 National Outdoor Book Award, “All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found” and “A Song for the River,” in which Connors bears witness to a megafire that forced him off his mountain and forever changed the forest and the watershed he loves.