We lived at the foot of a mountain.
As children we learned to count the toes.
Rough chucks of rock sticking
where they touched so we couldn’t forget
how many. Always someone calling out:
does it add up? Strong, sweet flavors
pushed out of palmate blossoms, a golden line
up the hillsides where later we followed
a sharp yelping we thought must be foxes
but we never glimpsed the coats,
devil of devils, ghost of ghosts. Our hands closing
on edges and legs lifting bodies, step by step,
over quartz and sandstone,
or coal, veins like sorrow emptying,
men’s bodies on stretchers, their faces true
smut, search and misfortune.
We might’ve lit a smudge pot in remembrance.
Songs: yes, we sang, but at our loudest
we heard outside our own echo
something without melody. Who steals wood
to make fire? When we attained
the grove, a circle of oaks should’ve risen.
We wandered another kind of rut, a groove
dug for the sake of stealing, and selling,
and stealing again, hiding the tracks
of machines, smoothing stingy turf over wounds.
We read a sign telling promises.
Words skipped here and there to make it true,
an easy pitch, our hands with fingers bent back,
no leather to cover them, where it said we had a gift,
a mountain. We needed the mountain, the mouth
carved open to show the fangs, and we could trust them
not to bite. We could trust the hero
of the mountain, his cap like a cookpot,
his dull boots, lowering himself on a chain, or a vine,
into sudden darkness for a story only
he could tell and we must not ask
wrong questions. We were a generous people then,
and tall, more like saplings than the flocks
of rhododendron that sometimes gathered to listen
as we talked. They rubbed their thick joints
like the legs of crickets, respectfully,
a tribe of believers not so much
on their knees as watchful and stern.
By then gravel roads bled when it rained.
We walked, we ran, we smelled urgency
resembling the stink of marigolds
rubbed between the palms to repel flies, wings
stuck together in the presence of gods. We said. We sang.
We let the soles do the seeking. And then it was the sun
drifting like a feather into some kind of gorge.
Who painted those stripes? They’re not water.
Someone said a giant and someone said we’ve worked for this
and someone lit a torch or cigarette
and the place we stood rolled away as we stared,
quivering in its own wake like a sulfur cloud,
burning entrails, stirring the broody shell
of guts unwound from its caverns. Our shadows
spread flat before us, giving up. We walked
in a strange steam that had no color but stained.
We had nowhere to go, no sack of moss, no biscuit.
It was a mountain, yes, exposed, breathing
its story of shame, hidden until now, hauled out
in crates and boxcars, turned into hard money
to pay for junk and buckets and a sun
rising late like a drunkard, lying
down in a nightgown of smoke.
Wallowing in the valley, the tiny flowers
of thyme, stars of memory and everything
we hadn’t invented, photos we hadn’t taken
on cameras we didn’t own. We called ourselves artists.
We called ourselves tyrants. We followed a figure
drawn in charcoal, shaded with saliva. Look,
we said, it’s up ahead. And we walked farther,
to climb the slope to a higher projection,
so many steep boulders and bounds,
staghorns, but as in the songs for dreaming
ourselves to sleep we only turned on our heels,
our reflections in muddy pools, we headed up
but spun irrevocably down.