Blessings of high oblivion

Last Of Snow

Summer and the sun assists the sky in retrieving
everything it ever gave across the passing of two seasons.
Mountains lose their wisdom and what distinguished
them above all other geocracies in what the sky conferred
through hope and hard weather, granted for their suffering in
standing so close to such reckless blessings of high oblivion.

Snow is lost at last and only those summits whose
torments are eternal are allowed to keep their ascended
mantels. It is the way of risen things. Now comes
the scourges and sorrows of living without water,
arid striations seen millennia away, footless impasses
that warn the wary traveler to seek flatter spheres of wander.

We will hold these hoarless ranges to the fury of our gaze,
keep vigil in remembrance of what we left to the tracks we
lost when quest mattered to the motion of our moving bones,
before the sun sipped them all up through the sore straws
of our muscles, when fire held the driftless gospels of our
deepest believing. Some of us never come back. We know this.

We know also that some of us never go. Whether forth into realms
made brittle by the very marrow of our fear, or down into dreaded
glaciations that would seek to make chalices of our sacrificed breath. In this manner does ice carve caverns within us all. This might be confused as shelter or faith, a womb in the rock that would nourish within us something too easily taken by sun, sky, season, snow.

Joseph Gallo
May 20, 2006