The lad walks saintly towards me
across a clifftop, mazed with broken walls
unforgiven by a perfect sky.
Grass flats, hummocks of burrowed slabwork
scattered to catch at confident feet:
this is the vertigo place of falling dreams,
this is the height of balance
between flight and shatter
back to unity in the tangled sheets.
It's there again, as mountains screened
in a stranger's televisual:
the young shaman cloaked
brown against the far valleys of snow,
striding the dangerous ridge, returning
from his hero journey.
*
A clear hold between the flickers:
I have fallen from here before.
Just as one was getting on nicely
how one is squeezed out like toothpaste
into light
and the world's slippery hands
which begin at once to teach
breath and the weight of uncertainty
between the ribs.
*
In hard light it's a steep learning climb
to land up at this top, circled by fall,
to stand in sweat and teeter.
On the face of it three hornhead sheep
tapple from rock to snow-pocket to rock
towards the peakland grass.
Fingering out there a stare
reaches be-heathered
and the stones turn under its touch
and rise in sheer affrontery
to trace their geology, stratum to stratum,
rehearsing their burnt and boiled years
crushed and folded and metamorphic years
to criticise our brief and easy ride.
On the face of it
they'd rise to all occasions
but their cold hard testament
is flat against co-operation.
Across the sun-flood beyond
the glacier's deferred outcome
the stones turn.
