Humphry’s Island

Ethan Pond, Mt Willey

“if you don’t believe in reincarnation, take a walk in the fucking woods.”

when breath vanishes from my lungs

kneels before my heart and the green

fountain rises before me and reincarnates

and reincarnates

the long isles lead to only one place

solitude

and it moves across my eyes as floaters

the darting personage the gauzy silhouette

of what is yet

just seeing the mountains draped

across the horizon, things once alive in me

offer their wrists, pollinate

new landscapes and eyes sit up,

eyes that have been snoring

and never in transit

never looking for anything or anyone

gawk at everything and every fallen tree

becomes home or humus

huge downed sails draped the

mountainside, splintered masts choked

by new growth, littered

the steep of Willey with a drowsy entropy

the static in the sky had never been so

obvious to me before, metamorphosing

between the shade and glare

of early may

as if branches of the sky showed their dominion

over branches of birch and their limbs stabbed

into earth only to regenerate into the next

growth, the next generation to penetrate

tomorrows low flying clouds and

make dew of them

Strung Between One Season And The Next

we wait on the embankment

in front of tombstones of trees

waiting for the siege of winter

watching the shadows of lanky birches

scar the burnt mountainsides

and the creek cough it’s weak trickle

the footsteps of wind emerging from every corner

Januarys use to be more fertile

use to drop its dress over the

rusted ironwork of branches

by now

Mt Tecumseh would lower it’s staircase to our

two conspiratorial hammocks

strung between two seasons

two falling birds and two twin leashed suns

when finally the library above pushed its books from its shelves

released its white roosters

we pressed on ahead

cut the virgin day in two

composed the most marvelous living music

of ski against snow

crunch against slide

and finally when flanked by night and temperature

a fire rose from the snow

warming a pouch of wine

and toes gnawed on by cold

we retreated to the swing of a hammock

dangling from one season to the next

the chandelier of snow above us mounting