I want to come to these mountains like god
with the patience to see stone
from the beginning, a mind
that holds all at once
the nothing
becoming
points of light
becoming
magma and plates.
Their inexorable movement
a thunderous up
then grain by grain down
rock weeping slow dry tears of itself
into wet valleys.
This stream is not a heart
the water it pushes from
inside the mountain
not blood.
But my god ear can hear
the long inhale of seed to tree
the deep sigh out as
wood makes soil
and it seems obvious that
where there are lungs
filling
emptying
there is also a pulse
undulating under this mineral skin.
Time’s coiled backbone
bends to touch itself.
Did the sky have a heartbeat,
before we were under it
or in it?
An orange twilight offers
a moon of bone to
stars who remember
its pale body
slick with birth
its first windless breath
over unmarked land.
