Rise and Fall

When the weather is this cold, and we're held indoors by a chill wind as impassable as any lock, it seems only fair to dream of the world without. This poem is in memoriam of the majestic Oregon mountains - in fact, all the majestic Oregon landscape - that I shall not meet again, until a balmier climate returns.


Rise and Fall

The earth is endless in expanse;
a land as sprawling as the Eastern sky;
it leaps and rises in advance,
unharnessed as a haring horse, awry,
to pick a pattern out in prance,
a wild whirl of a dance
that none can follow, even as they try.

A windswept pirouette to raise
the valleys up and extrovert their might,
to blunt the mountains, once ablaze
and burnished by the early morning light,
until they rest a lower gaze
of pygmy hills upon the haze
that holds the furrows of their former height.

This weathering wears out the years
that flit along, as leaves upon the air,
unnumbered by the veiled gears,
those slowly spinning rigs of disrepair
that carry change in old careers
of time and tide and other fears
and lay the massifs lower than a prayer.

And yet, the rolling days will come
when ranges rise, again, and crest a brow,
each elder summit to succumb
then holding high a youthful head at how
its crescent slopes are rendered plumb
and subtle runnels are become
fantastic torrents coursing to the slough.

For, nothing new shall see the sun,
when all has come about in ages past,
and ages full have just begun
as even they are realized, amassed
of peaks and valleys, each and one
in shifting stature never done,
and all upon the earth, supremely vast.