I know a private mountain range with a big bowl in its center that you find by following the narrowest creek bed, sometimes crawling until you struggle through a thicket until you reach two large cupped hands of stone in the middle of which is a hill, a promontory, which would be called a mountain back home. There is iron in this hill and it sucks down summer lightning, thousands and thousands of strokes through time, shattering the gigantic top into a field of undramatic crystals that would bring a buck a piece at a rock show. I was here in a dark time and stood there and said, "I have put my poem in order on the threshold of my tongue," quoting someone from long, long ago, then got the hell off the mountain due to tremors of undetermined source. Later that night sleeping under an oak a swarm of elf owls (@3Micrathene whitneyi@1) descended to a half-dozen feet above my head and a thousand white sycamores undulated in the full moon, obviously the living souls of lightning strokes upside down along the arroyo bed. A modern man, I do not make undue connections though my heart wrenches daily against the unknowable, almighty throb and heave of the universe against my skin that sings a song for which we haven't quite found the words. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...VARIATIONS: 17 by CONRAD AIKEN TO THE NIGHTINGALE by JOHN MILTON THE SOLSEQUIUM by ALEXANDER MONTGOMERIE ADDRESS TO THE MUMMY AT BELZONI'S EXHIBITION by HORACE SMITH TIRED MOTHERS by MAY LOUISE RILEY SMITH CIRCUS AT NIGHT by MADELEINE AARON |