for Mary Emerson
And now it isn't there. The whole
brooding heap of Waldo's oversoul
sticking its tongue out at little
men who swallowed soot and spittle
in ordinary walks
while sage philosophers ascended
to eternal vistas airy and splendid
underneath blunted horns of reason
(lovely-looking with stunted trees on
and fetching cosmologic rock)
has disappeared behind the snow
as once, more than millennia ago,
it lay beneath a mile of ice
and, groaning, ground its teeth of gneiss.
Even then, only a worn root
of what had been and gone, it lay
graveling in geomorphic splay—
no monumental emblem of
everlasting pride or immanent love,
but bedrock underfoot.
The snowfall, on another hand,
thickens otherwise invisible wind.
This could be grandeur lightly sifting
on our broad shoulders, or underfoot lifting
us a little higher
by damp inches, so: like gods
we walk above ground, not on earthy clods
but downy clouds of white
which, compressed by our immortal weight
into frozen mire,
at least retain a warm print—
the saintly dent of our impression in it.
That it will melt in the first sun
needn't unduly unbalance anyone.
Even mountains wear
and where we in illusion stepped,
the grass will grow as green as if we'd kept
safely inside and made philosophy
out of a landscape we can barely see
somewhere out there.
Photograph by Barbara Danser
Smoky Quartz 