All the thrusts of clouds, the leaps

that boulder legs stretch over each other,

the struggling turns of river and glacier

suggest distant echoes of choral thunder,

yet offer only a mist lifting off rocks.

I am quiet at full speed.

I would remain here. I would run away.

I wait for words that quiet doesn’t have.

The greens fall on greens, all shades and depths.

They are pyramid archives inside light and dark.

Mountain over valley to an ocean of mountains

are what the eye cannot manage. So, it holds

on to a fissure here with candescent blue,

a sputter there of a fall that hints of more.

All language has been cancelled by the sun.

Memory is adrift and makes things up.

What was snow and ice rubs into streams,

cuts crevices in the high slopes,

leaps in a long fall that foams the air,

its rolling twists surrender to the pines.

There is no waiting on this mound

that I will never leave because every leaf

of time has lost place and definition,

as wet has no weight in the sea.

I have never entered here before,

and I’ve been here all along.

I am watching beyond the moon and the sun.

I see the moose kick along in the stream,

the wolf tethered to a scent on the road.

I am connected as the grizzly to her cub.

I should have known from walks in the snow,

from waves on the shore, red in the sky.

The red-winged blackbird kept calling from the circles

of time that are place without measure.