Darkridge Mountain
By Doug Bolling

I know the question you always
ask as we climb, climb: Who owns
it anyway, who planted the flag of
madness on this anchor of the winds.

Pebbles rattle underfoot as though
to recite the history of incaution.
The fields below are talking to them-
selves in an alien language.

My apartment in the valley shrinks
into a mockery of itself, of me. My
pretensions of studied angst have
climbed into the decorator trash bin.

Higher, higher, you say, until the
incomparable jaws of this monster
prove our kinship to small beer, our
ghostly baptisms in shallows of gurry.

We have passed above the tree line,
that girdle of easy virtue and old
stories. Our expensive breaths are
drowning in a high drama of wind.

No Platonists allowed up here, you say.
Just those who revel in the nothingness
beyond the crest, who relish the old age
of matter and prove flesh by it.

Perhaps this time we'll reach the top,
two gumboils in the mouth of majesty.
If so I know what to expect: ceremony of
silence where only wind and rock speak.