Fulcrum on which Shasta and Kailash
are
yoked in teetering balance,
rocks
held, one in each hand,
to
weigh us down, like past and future,
preventing impromptu levitation,
spontaneous
peregrination
among
the timeless stars;
hinge from which the sky is swung;
centre;
pivot;
pirouette of stone
performed to a
tune
in geological time
accented by your summit;
hall without walls, in which constellations gather
and
turn towards their dance,
and
planets tip and tilt and dip and tuck back and forth
in
retrograde revels;
bosom in which mist-swaddled stars are gently rocked.
You summon us to your wind-lashed summit
and we
find our way
through
five stages of ascent,
through
each rigour of purification.
I do not believe
the
shattered scree and splintered stones
tell us
your ancient ramparts have fallen
and your
citadel of souls is scattered
by our
stumbling assault
on the few steps
immediately in front of us,
to be replaced
by nothing more than a cairn
of
casual commemoration
gathered by our idiotic reflex,
our
groping hands preserving
some
whimsical illusion
of
conquest and significance
among
the dumb debris
we
meaningless Munro-baggers
infiltrate,
navigating through
the dismal ruins
of the present
littered with souls of broken stone.
Your walls still stand, invisible.
Our
silent porter still responds
when
your gatekeeper calls “pa gur?”
Our
hearts recite their retinue of beats
and
within your stones remains
a song
for those who can hear it:
we can think past this time and place we seem to be in,
melt
our minds and let the stones soak them up
like
sponges, and all the opacity of this basalt,
this
cloud-ballast, finally becomes as crystal clear
as the
glass upon whose rim Polaris runs his fingertip
to emit the
sound
summoning us,
gathering us together,
from
everywhere and all time
in the
middle of the land
to show all our centrifugal
selves
we are each and every one of us gathered together
from
everywhere and all time,
comrades
in beauty.
No comments:
Post a Comment