you might think you know
but that’s never what knowing means
a light last seen in winter
with sharp-edged shadows
two high hanging valleys
filled with forest
where the only fields
are boulder fields
this is the complex head
of an Appalachian dragon
that the locals have been led
to believe is a mountain
all you see from the river
is the stone snout
thoroughly domesticated
with a Mohawk of crosses
flags for each of the armed forces
snap above the veterans’ memorial bridge
but up a seldom-followed trail
past the reservoir
the trees are beginning
to swallow boulders whole
engulfing them with tight-
grained lips
as the earth extends
a single small black trumpet
in the middle of the trail
just as it starts to climb
and that silence becomes
an immediate ear-worm
in silence you drop to your knees
for a bright purple coral mushroom
in silence the cedar
waxwings whistle
the sassafras trees invent
a new choreography
you pass a white oak grove
carpeted with reindeer lichen
table mountain pines
parcel out the views
a fallen cone makes
a spiny souvenir
armed with hooks so it doesn’t
roll off the mountain
you station yourself among
other more durable fragments
of the paleozoic as
it has come down to us
collected works from the most widely
distributed of shallow seas
now habitat for rock tripe
lined in the tackiest black velvet
this is the glittery spine of a mountain
like a snake with two heads
the stream cuts through one
to climb the other
from the vista you see
little that isn’t wild
for a small town
that values sacrifice
this is where you’d come
to give up your sense of what’s normal
maybe you’d bring a rifle
or a sixpack and a date
as a visitor from elsewhere
you allow yourself to be charmed
like a newt turning back into an eft
when its pool-for-life goes dry
you like to think you could leave it all
and take to the trail again
become a youthful
avatar of yourself
if only you knew the way
to such rebirth
as the trail turns back
into a street
descending through town
you think you get the three crosses now
facing the mountain across the river
that lost its top to quarrymen
who prized the sand itself
from those ancient seabeds
to line the furnaces that once
smelted all our steel
the mountain on this side
got to keep its head
as a Golgotha
a place of the skull
and crossing the memorial bridge
you spot a family out fishing
lined up in chairs on the bank
watching the water
through the mountain’s reflection
waiting for something to emerge
Standing Stone Trail south of Mapleton
August 31, 2023