- As the mountains reckon time, they blaze
- like geological lightning, like days
- of mayflies among the planet’s stiffened bones,
- racing, in the blink of centuries,
- while the peaks, the sober Pharisees,
- sit robed in samite on their granite thrones.
- Violating the silence of the heights,
- they crack as they calve, as if they laugh with delight
- and rob the summit of boulders, like children stealing fruit,
- and tumble them down the moraine, rolling inches in years.
- They transubstantiate snow into stone laid in layers
- of celestial blue, striped with ripples of soot.
- The sky is gone ashen, and bled all its blue to the ice
- whose fissured lips receive the ocean’s kiss.
- Patient trees grow tall as the glacier runs,
- and the flow pauses between advance and retreat
- to hear the pulse the mountain’s heart will beat.
- The mountains pause for the dance of distant suns.
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