Near Mountains
A poem of mountains too near to see, smoke, youth, and aftersound.
Read the stitched line. Then unfasten the image.
Poem & studio photograph
MOUNTAIN / DISTANCE / AFTERSOUND
Summit Over All · painting from the Poetry Landscape series · photographed work.
Mao Zedong is a mountain range too close to us;
its summit is low enough to touch.
Too close:
we see wind’s fingernails scratch the rock,
see him age like a riverbed,
dull, and still in motion.
He aged too quickly,
so that we had no time to step back.
Young people prefer Che Guevara:
the figure moving between fire and mist.
He is a sexy version of Buddha,
one cigar more than Buddha,
one world less.
The smoke on him is rainforest fog,
a damp hallucination,
its temperature too hot to approach,
like a burning that cannot end.
The person who is gone forever
is always young.
I imagine lighting a cigarette for him.
Firelight catches his face
like the beginning of a revolution,
and I am only the aftersound of wind.
Everything I wanted to say
goes out in the instant he turns away.