Tag: vvr

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