Up Spruce Knob road in cloud mist

How like the heart when absence

outweighs that heft once carried

Forest Roads 12 and 1024

Startle doe at East Overlook

light rain & one cardinal flower

Seven more deer

one fawn eohippus-sized

Spruce smell invokes

memory’s myriad things:

Far West  Far North  Ultima Thule

like 10,000 songs of Milarepa

Lone blackberry bush in bloom

rain harder now at a slant

Oxalis (?) plant snugs low

ignores drying montane winds

Spruce Knob in cloud

& imagination

Views cloud-blanked

like hard-sought No-mind

10 years’ sitting worth

Piles of rock slabs on top

like large scree below no slope

Frost-heave quarried maybe

then weather-smoothened

Cloud-hidden

whereabouts unknown

                                    — Ed Zahniser