The Mountain Top: Evening and Morning

Dry-grain rock springs the feet like cropped grass

until, with long final strides across bare boiler-plate slabs,

I am dipping my head

                                       in the high mountain sky,

                                       with fifty miles of elbow room

                                       on either side to spare.

Darkness sumps horizon’s light

and invites me

to stay the night,

to drench my scalp

in small hours indigo,

cryptic counter-code

for day’s blazing blue.

Only silver meteor slashes remind me that things move:

constellations, galaxies and lone stars lure my sanity

                                                                                             to ecstatic edge.

                                                                                             Delirium?

                                                                                             Hold on, for morning.

Yet something was there,

heard in slithering scree,

seen in dark shadow-bulks,

scent of pine revealing 

a scent not-of-pine,

animal fear on my tongue,

a sense of tense, stealthy touch

deep within, a pulse to each nerve-end

until silent atoms of light cluster,

then thicken into myriad layers,

reclaiming distance and detail.

Azure day’s dip

was potent, heady.

Violet night’s

was one rational gulp

from drowning.

← Poems 2014-2017