4000-Keith McFarlane
4000
By Keith McFarlane
It’s about as high as that, Mount Diablo out my window;
not quite, but close. Tarantulas patrol thereabouts.
Shouts heard on the road up the hill echo there still.
I have no money to pay the fee, but slip in just the same.
Not so high as the even number, but the better for it,
as nature does not wait breathless for you to stop growing.
You climb steady, but with a pain we can’t see. You heave
by lurch and grumble, so quiet that we think you a
monolith. Stone carved mountain, grace of tree and shrub
from a sprinkling of life-giving dust. We don’t feel the
slip of the rift, but inevitable it is, like the slow
procession of a million soldiers, by twos, by fours, by sixes,
crumbled to dust under your weight, unmerciful mountain,
shaken and stirred, birds fluttering about, rocking as a
warboat on unsteady blood-soaked seas. Abandoned thereupon
to die are remnants of platoons, bolders plowing paths
through unsuspecting plains. Through the shake, the rising
dust, the inch of lift. That much closer to the scorching
sun, the peak supports less life when it is done. But in
another week, month or year, another shake, another plume
of dust to mark the rising toll, the creeks that run with
dirt blood, the families of rock squirrels lost or moved
about the ruin of tectonic union. Another day, another
shake, to lift the death peak up and past four thousand.
Copyright C. 2008 Keith McFarlane