Ivy Raff
Mountain
I never axe-chopped any man in a shirt who carted off my children, called them
lumber. I never stuck sharp-tip poles in skins of campers, nor stuffed the dynamite
back in miners’ throats. You can keep it all. I live for the slow blank bristle
of every day. I live for the lover who sees the outline of me against gunmetal skies
of November & doesn’t seek to own me. Soon the creatures on my spines
will calm their skittishness, lose memories of hunting rifles, assemble
forever-nests for their babies. Soon brown bears will return
to paw my rivers for salmon & beavers will rebuild dams. I remember
those old fertile days. I remember them all the way from my beaten soils
to my summit’s mica glint. I remember them from brontosauri, wooly mammoth,
shimmer of water phyla across geologic time scales, fossil-imprint
clamshells in shale. I remember the sea blanketed me each night
for sixty thousand millennia. Do you remember your mother? I remember
when this place was an ocean & my peak was a baby, an island, a speck.
I remember being a rock. Old as the hills, goes your expression – honey, you don’t
know the half. You reach inside me & find copper. But it’s mine, that mine
you think is yours. My life is to grow iron inside. I need it
there more than you need your armour, your autos. My life is to live after
you’ve taken all that’s mine, after you’ve cleared my forest & picked my fruit.
My places are sacred. In the end you won’t have them. You call me a mountain.
I call myself nameless, majestic as the g?d the holy won’t pronounce. My life’s
pocked with caves. Come for a sit. Taste what it is
to be mountains, find space in your ribs. Find give in your spine. Find
your porous nature at my granite face. My life is to sit. My lover kicks up
or dies, that ephemeral wind. My life is to wait for him, greet him still
when he comes. Yearn with no passion, permanent peace.
I comfort the stars, never envy their burning.