We drove almost to the mountain-top,
And had no wish leave it when we stopped;
No wish to leave the dew-enhanced, dew-christened air
That pleasured the lungs like a circus scare
When the sure trapeze for once escapes talced fingers
And the mind on sudden emptiness must linger
That had thought to catch a glittered body's twirl.
The thinness of the atmosphere made dull
The closing click of doors when we stood
A moment out of the car and out-of-doors.
Sunset took the higher half of woods
And the tin toy of the Ranger Tower
And showed us how a second Troy would burn.
We smiled to see just what we understood
As we stood together without a word,
Without the cluttered need to speak and yearn
That had made our road-trip Cassandra and the King.
The library had malformed our limbs
To wood, as much as books are wood, by sitting still
To read. We were over-ready to try a climb
Or try our no-words silence or try anything
To stretch out the long day of many knots
Our deep need to know had dearly bought.
The road swirled up away from feet at once
Round the mountain-top as round an ice-cream cone;
The road was rock and mist, the bones of clouds,
Red tatters gone redly under sky's west rim,
Like lashes of an agitated eye grown dim.
We watched small spots of dark swell and bud
And swarm up after us all the way until
At the last powerline we were caught
In a fatal undertow like a single thought.--
We walked on colder, with dark-adjusted eyes,
Still rounding toward the top. Things in nature
Cried out their alphabet of names, but none
Were ours, or reflected back any name we knew.
Our silence stretched between us like a clue.
Footsteps added footnotes one by one
Until we had left lower for higher ground for sure.
The tower sprang into the interrupted skies.
Spray paint through a lettered grid of spaces
Had tiered the artifact with conflicted texts.
We smiled once again to see nature vexed;
To touch where some derelict human trace is.
We grinned, too short of breath this time for speech;
We would have said a word or two this time,
For comfort's or for habit's sake, among pines
Where, in counterfeit of clouds, we saw our breaths
Touch. But we were wordless and rib-sore,
Out of perspective in a piney bowl
Rushing up around us like a garden wall
That aimed to keep in both flesh and soul
Within the clear-burned stone which grayly bore
The bolted tower that rose without a door.
We might as well have been inside a kettle
With the tower for a witch's ladle
For everything additional that we could see.
We scanned the structure for defects, but hurriedly.
What with the talus and its getting late
We knew we didn't have the time we had.
Still we gripped the rungs; they poured a cold
Beyond experience under our skins.
They were put here for a purpose, as a gate
Is put- to propose a boundary and suggest
A sort of going through. Of course, the jest
Is that the gate can't tell who's going out or in.
And we ourselves can't be sure of what we take
With us, in a purpose we call ours.
The sky began to stipple with young stars.
Each strut galvanized chilled hand to sweat,
So that we had to pull rolled sleeves over
Each rung, and get what grip that could make
To hoist ourselves a little more above.
Our collars had been thumbed up since we'd begun;
Our inch-thick sweaters had been left to hang
Like exhausted swimmers over library chairs.
Stars jarred and jumped --no, that was our eyes--
We took two deep sucks in to every one
That before our sojourn had satisfied.
What mist was in us at once would seize
Into ice spider-webs instantly as breath.
I hung halfway up a minute and heard
The charm of deadened church-bells in her tread,
Ringing on the upward steel as cold as death.
I looked around afloat in the tops of trees
Dizzy as masts and yardarms in a racing sea.
Night had come upon all things everywhere.
The trees put on their cassocks black and bare,
But refused to give a redemptive air.
Trees, gathered for prayers, stood devout.
The tower was all exposed angles and no lee.
She was where I couldn't quite make out--
Loudly made the platform on hands and knees.
Something of ice came down in shards.
A keening wind, whetted almost to urging,
Made me wonder darkly at the wooded ring;
The mountain leaned to windward
And snatched my shirt to tell me "Come and see..."
With a knowing note of something up a sleeve.
But this was more than would fit what I believe,
More sleeve and deeper than what I knew of me.
"You should see it up here, you really should.
Come up, Kerry, and hold me by the shoulders.
The world's as small and sharp as in a mirror.
If you shout down the mountain, you can hear
Echoes carry your own voice back, but clearer."
As if Earth were one to put our feelings to
Who never once told us what to do.