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ISOLATION
A man wandering in mountains finds
in winter above treeline whole conceptions
of shadow and light: fretcomb clouds
walling up against abundances of ice,
heaps of gneissic rock aglitter
beneath a thousand shades of wanton
iridescent blue: a man wandering in winter
mountains quickly forgets who and what
he came for, abdicates and abnegates, shucks
off ambition, responsibility, all things
corporate or corporeal, lets pinnacled
steep overwhelm: light is
pure light, and snow falling into nooks
and gashes of a ridgeline assume shapes
and structures even art and artisan
can’t conceive: a man in winter
wandering dark mountains compasses so closely
landscape he’s adjoined to, hears
amid frozen catchments the dripdrop
of juncos hopping, looks to see snow
buntings boomerang from cliff face
to slackening sky: wandering in mountains
a man in dark winter knows next to nothing
yet studies the sere white grid
of his maunder in lapidary ways: assailing sleetstrung
heights, enduring spindrift sieges and moving
step by step toward cairn past anchoring cairn,
he follows contours mountains
hold out to him, bows to avoid spruce
boughs heaped with camels’ humps of snow,
and by lamplight will sink sometimes
to his knees, unburying a hidden stream.
Then again a mountain man
in winter sometimes just has to
go on, trusting shadow
and radiance, declivity and peak,
and the long untrammeled walk from nowhere
that will free him for dreaming, relieve him
of burden, until he next returns.
Timothy Muskat ©2013
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