Every Form of Mother

How many times does the trail rot away from your feet?
To what end do you climb any mountain?
The end is the top, and then what?
Do you lift off into space,
Or go down the other side to a life that is
Similarly different
Than the life you left?

The snow covers all sides
And the peak.
Footprints remain no matter where they are stepped.
Shocks slide down the mountainside,
Bringing a symphony of falling, of gravity.
Odes to all the natural processes have been spoken by
Every form of mother, even mountains without mouths.

Winter takes place on the slopes and above.
Weather makes the beaten shape
That weathers and rests all the somnolent children
Of sleepytime’s happiness
From out of the wind of no time.
We are not in the caverns,
We are not in the crags,
The mountain does not speak to us.

Only the air which swirls around the peak
In the forlorn months when there is little light
Can tell us which way is the sky and
When the birds fall all through the living ground and into
Wells and wells of swelling dynamite.
I live for the explosions of the neon new.
The ground shakes,
And I sleep upon it,
Awakening to a time of blue shelters amidst the
Clammy hands of tiny flame that
Breathe every ordinary moment into our lungs.

There is beauty in the mouth,
But I cannot speak it.