and the deer came
on long legs between the trees
and clashed antlers with a sound
old and dry as the wind
gnats danced as if
summer had returned
for one day only
everything must go
through a gray mist that may
have been in my head
i measured the mountain
with my body pacing it out
i walked among birches
nothing but blank pages
overtook milkweed
giving birth to clouds
looped past the wild gravevines
their convolutions laid bare
following the bed
of an old coal railroad
with the leaves mostly down
saw far below
the remains of a car wheels-up
among deer-tongue grass
abandoned halfway through
the age of fishes
when seas saved
the mud of ancestral mountains
for 62 million years
until a mass extinction
getting younger
as i climbed
into the age of amphibians
and giant dragonflies
pressed into rock by later layers
now sloughed off
and the horizon opened like a rose
on ever more mountains
