1.
Heat humbles those who stay below. …. Fireweed furs the trail’s edge. We make for a far-up peak, aglow …. In sunlight. The high ledge
Disappears into cold white ahead. …. Once we’re past the tree line, Snow-fields begin to spread …. Up the mountain’s spine.
Constellations of moss campion …. Rear amethyst arrays On heaps of Precambrian stone, …. Flaked tan and warmer clays,
Some crude and high as burial mounds …. Upraised from the moraine, Barren but bound and bordered round …. By blooms of leopardbane.
2.
In black a tempest begins, orographic Lifting after the Pacific. Ominous Rain-shadows join slower mountain-shadows. Our leader, disheartened, says we must turn back.
Twenty degrees drop in seconds. We feel There is still time to pause at an alpine Lake before the coming squall, Watching light that alters the lake’s crystalline
Depths and August ice-bergs: Bright white crests, Aquamarine along edges that blur Into celestial blue and emerald chests Below a surface of perfect water.
Hail arrives. In its shower of icy pellets We sense we are, this high, truly powerless. Looking back, the cold and storm-consumed summit Could be on Mars, vacant and flowerless.
3.
Down in town, I’m again alone. …. I listen to the flow Of the creek over its bed of stone …. To the valley below.
A coral-colored crown of cloud …. Gives way to twilight And constellations that crowd …. In to bring the night.
I’m almost startled by star fields, …. So massive and dense here. Though I no longer see it, I feel …. The lost mountain appear
Even in the dark, at first uncertain …. How this could be. How could I Know the position of a mountain …. Invisible to the eye?
4.
Though I can’t see the peak, I know its shape …. At night as a space where the stars Go out around the edges of the landscape, …. Surfacing snout of black that bars
The starlight, crypt of ice and ancient rock: …. Unattainable recess, Measured only by what it blocks, …. Necklaced in witches thimble and bittercress,
Created as it erases, and lit …. In contrary by black forced high, Forged in furnaces of frost, and infinite Energies, to consume us, and the sky.