Something greater than hours
Zardeh Kuh
There are places my travel will never embrace, mountains and passes in countries that live only in the flatlands of maps I have collected, goatless, herdless, unfettered by tribes that migrate like blood through lands that have built hearts within them. I shall not ford rivers whose entire lengths are given to me to see at mere glance, source to sea, tributaries perused by the gods that graced them to run rilled and unseen.
Endure, says the ice. Trod, says the high snow. Move, says the grass that whispers from four valleys and a massif away. Slaughter for meat, caress for milk, carry for ovenlorn bread all that you would bear children for in this way and let no mountain resist you, not the summit before you that would keep you for company when the driftbound moon falters in her rise and the wind laments a cloudless sky. What you bring to the world the world returns to you. This is the offering of ages that would know no age.
Move then into the high pass, barefoot and steeped in red snow, the thousands of you who link your passing to the story of your tell, one long unfettered chain of skin and rock and valleys of chanting grass that your animals hum with in mute afternoons and soundless mornings as the sun redoubles back on itself and time loses coherency to achieve a more calibrated meaning measured by something greater than hours or years for these uppermost flowers came before the sun itself could spill upon them, before the travel I cannot confer was ever imagined, before my foot was born in a nebula and a god broke from the icy rock to speak Zardeh Kuh! Zardeh Kuh! Zardeh Kuh!
Joseph Gallo
November 27, 2005
3:47am
There are places my travel will never embrace, mountains and passes in countries that live only in the flatlands of maps I have collected, goatless, herdless, unfettered by tribes that migrate like blood through lands that have built hearts within them. I shall not ford rivers whose entire lengths are given to me to see at mere glance, source to sea, tributaries perused by the gods that graced them to run rilled and unseen.
Endure, says the ice. Trod, says the high snow. Move, says the grass that whispers from four valleys and a massif away. Slaughter for meat, caress for milk, carry for ovenlorn bread all that you would bear children for in this way and let no mountain resist you, not the summit before you that would keep you for company when the driftbound moon falters in her rise and the wind laments a cloudless sky. What you bring to the world the world returns to you. This is the offering of ages that would know no age.
Move then into the high pass, barefoot and steeped in red snow, the thousands of you who link your passing to the story of your tell, one long unfettered chain of skin and rock and valleys of chanting grass that your animals hum with in mute afternoons and soundless mornings as the sun redoubles back on itself and time loses coherency to achieve a more calibrated meaning measured by something greater than hours or years for these uppermost flowers came before the sun itself could spill upon them, before the travel I cannot confer was ever imagined, before my foot was born in a nebula and a god broke from the icy rock to speak Zardeh Kuh! Zardeh Kuh! Zardeh Kuh!
Joseph Gallo
November 27, 2005
3:47am
post-time 11:17 PM
5 Comments:
Simply gorgeous, Joseph.
You really should be rich and famous, Joe. Perhaps the fact that you are not is a comment on the depravity of our society.
Joseph, this is incredible and how I want to visit these places.. and how it is so hard going back to that way of life again.
Joseph is rich, he is rich in life and vibrant reality, he is rich in being...
I LOVE mountainscape pictures. So close to where my own ancestors came from...*sigh*....love of it must be in my blood.
Post a Comment
<< Home