PAX MONTANA  

                                               for my parents

 

 

the gaze into distance

black sheep across, with their

off-spring - & also generations

 

door at door. in the night that

flickering mountain range,

by day true to its stratification.

 

last century’s wind in hallways

& staircases. taking the nightly

elevator, in my back this gaze

 

of stucco, angel like & melancholic,

& that liftboy’s pervading one,

out of the fading daguerreotype.

 

hidden whisper behind & after me,

& in hans castorp’s conviction,

the knowledge of what settles

 

down on sleeping lungs. now,

in the morning the swiss paradox

of frozen rocks’ layer walls,

 

disappearing cows & steep green

slopes, sickened by periodontal

disease. behind tops of snow &

the focused summit’s cross another

mountain range & a valley again

& so forth, transcendence without

 

human announcement, the moment,

immersion - free of charge - into

the course of fossilized gravitation

 

towards earth, the vertical cut into

& any time. in an instant eye’s blink

swifts & their shrill screams.

 

 

published in: Florida English, 2008, vol. 6, Special Imagist Issue, p. 28.