David Canning shares the context behind his poem 'You and the Mountain' and explores the tensions that a passion for mountains can bring to family life.

A full life is a plurality lived as versions of a self driven by singular and consistent passions. Lover, husband, father, friend, son, colleague, writer and climber; however I describe myself, I am wholly and completely one of these things or all of them at once. They compete with each other for my attention, for my affection, for my time, as aggregates, as equal facets, a quantum of my whole self.

Eventually we can learn to put aside possessive tendencies driven from fear of loss, and learn to live with risk as a calculation. I enjoyed the freedom of cycling to work through London's rush hour, and, over fifteen years, I was knocked down twice by careless motorists. Just a few bruises for me but cyclists were often killed. I'd been climbing for only a few years when I had to make a terrible call home to report that my climbing partner and I had been in a horrific accident.

In the Ogwen Valley, a large rock fell on us, amputated my climbing partner's foot in front of me and missed my head by inches. My climbing buddy survived and has adapted well to climbing with a prosthetic leg. I was left with mild PTSD. The rescue was national news and featured in the official history of the Ogwen Valley Mountain Rescue Organisation, Risking Life and Limb, such is its lore.

It was precisely because my wife, Rachel, naturally feared that something like this would happen one day that she hated the idea of my being away climbing for days on end. I would dismiss her worry, but surely this was now her justification? The mountain rescue team told me I had to climb again as an act of healing, and so, instead of asking me to stop, it has led to an accommodation, a greater understanding of my (indeed our) need for the mountains as extensions of our love for each other. I need to climb like I need her and she knew that.

Climbers know this feeling of wanting to live all of their lives at once, and paying the price. French climber Élisabeth Revol escaped Nanga Parbat with her life, having been forced to make the awful decision to leave behind her climbing partner, who was dying from a high altitude cerebral edema. Racked with guilt and doubt, a survivor's guilt and self-blame, unjustified and tragically severe, she vowed never to return to climbing, but she did. Revol sums it up in this way: she didn't want to talk about mountains any more, but she realised that a life without mountains, without high altitude, is as unimaginable for her as life without her husband. 'I go up there to live life fully', she says, 'my life'. Mountains are, of course, not people, they are unfeeling, mere geography, but they are very much alive. But the sublime is not rational, love picks at the mind with religious obsession, carves a graven image of itself in rock.

You and the Mountain

A virgin sky spills pink across the mountains
crumpled over the horizon like a wedding dress
fallen to the floor, the air still white with breath
slows the teasing of ropes through karabiners
chiming like votive bells.

Joined to the rock, I am grafted to its imperfections
fingers search out its recessed, cupped, and jugged features
judging the mountain's consent to my touch, I cautiously
advance along a bleached rib
sensing her mysteries opening up.

She is willing in her seduction, eager for me
to imagine her metamorphic nakedness
beneath fresh pillows of snow
white like the sheets I left you in
cocooned in the exquisite beauty of sleep.

I crept away in 4am secrecy
trying not to wake you I groped the tented darkness
leaving you with untouched hands
lips bearing a kiss unkissed
body heat fading from a dreamt embrace.

The reclining mountain lifts a spindrift veil
aches for discovery in the dizzy air
beyond the snow line, alone
she desires to be climbed
hand over hand, fully known.

I dig in deep, ice axe and crampons claw
rope sinews straining, a cold adrenaline sweat
muscles in blood heat spasm and burn
you and the mountain are in equal measure
lovers to which I must return.