Medicine Wheel
Standing, rough earth unfolded everywhere,
Forgetting, almost, to breathe,
One descending, spreading chasm capped with grey,
A vast, united, inhabitantless quiet,
And fifty thousand trees.Parking, then descendent, the rough trail cuta merest scratch
Across cold galleries of stone, to the first lookout we come,
Impatient, driving far, to see over the valley,
Behold the lower hillsto curiously look back
Across the slumped, uneven misted plain
So distant-whence we came,
And taste upon our un-cared hungry tongues
The ponderous clear gulf of mountain-sinking air.Silence, moon-escaped, unbroken, deep as outer space,
The flung down heights of breaking mounts
Unshaken, fallen everywhere, millions of years old
But near three billion at the top
In limbs of countless sprawls of arms and legs and
Rivulets of stone hair
The head lost somewhere high above
We breathe, and look, and be.
I take you in my hand. We are alone. You whisper.
Medicine Wheel's not far.Higher must we risefar past the roof clouds,
Past countless bleeding curves,
Past that thoughtless dimness which in closing tides descends,
Hugging every stone.
But we are almost there.(It's there:
Cloaked in robes of mist, in hides of bead-dense rain,
Its thought-brought rocks each waiting, cold, and wet.
A ribboned fence surrounds it,
The stains of nomads' fires, fifteen centuries in age,
Only an hour's walk away.)Ascendant, numbing, moving on,
Soon forgetful we will rise upon what merely seems a road,
Frigid, glazed with damp, inturned, but moving side by side,
Our hands bent in our pockets,
Speaking, now and then, but hearing far more clearly,
And with more inward grace,
The gentle stir and muffle of our soles
Upon the unresisting yet lifting skin of earth.One-hundred miles on one clear day, they'll say.
But today, when we arrive, we will not even see the ledge.
Not even touch one stone.
Not make our subtle reading of the sky
Our only chance
The stars and moon remembered rumors, or just sighs beneath a sea.There is one single season: it is grey.
Somehow, still, we will not mind. We will not feel forlorn,
As if the sun-gilt curving vistas turned away,
Or blue heaven struck against us.
Together we will amble, serene, about the fence,
Stab our noses softly toward its center,
And imagine what still mustwhat surely must
Lie everywhere around.You hold me in your hand.
There is no grey. No cold.
No sish of misted breath of rain.
No loss.Tattered, colored ribbons hang everywhere together.
There is another seeing.