A solitary heartbeat must suffice, if the soul will have its miles
Of blistered yearning still to make, and an arid wind
That shakes dead thoughts from awkward trees. It occurs as scripted:
One knows the mountain as oneself, obtaining the pass
Of the lone ridge that yawns and gives to a final face its mere reality
Blown of shine. One has just begun to believe oneself
When a sun drops livid on a thread to melt these mysteries,
these dark peaks seen in darkened pools dissolving,
these irresolute truths that scatter in the brain.

Each thing's impermanence is disclosed to the wandering eye:
Infinities of things extinguishing, things that sublimate
The incessant zero of God, and burst. It must have once sufficed;
It must suffice. But here in the endless bliss of stones we falter
Unconsciously, these mute things loved by feet. We must carry their need,
These extinct desires, or bear an oblivious tongue through immediate space:
The soul in going bears desires minutely. It is audible, the heart of earth
And tendons of earth that strain beneath some vast unfeeling weight...

Perhaps we are born to carry this, as eternities the earth forgets,
to step too long, through some magnetism culling an anguished echo
of Pandora's thought, where the path ends sculpting earth
Making earthbound things of us, as refugees who, risen to arise,
Have climbed too quickly, seen the forest plunging to the floor,
The arduous path discarded like a string and disconsolately
Broken, our forgotten clue, as we hasten to assume the air.

At such altitudes the heart grows faint; we know each stretch of earth below
As a man who has risen and fallen, antagonized upwards
And died in vain. We have known these episodes, these atlantic
Places that linger like a loving hand and lift, to gather
The mountain's agony and agonies of air and stand finally
Sourceless, bereft, enveloped in the corona of the mind.
The highest is yet too high, though not enough; it shatters us
In swift minutia sweeping across a strand, mere exiles that gather
And are gone– this is a footprint of a father– this a wife–
This is the valley bent below us with rage, a soft thunder
Tilting the glass of daylight down, upon the gone, gone
Forest veiled in the hidden soul. The mind unmakes this
Ecstasy of peaks, this mesh of self and miracle: it is needed
To bring vision, if at all, to a simple sleep. But a foot that passes
Need not know dreaming, as if the landscape were a murdered god,
each height a childless angel one steps on climbing the soul.

At last there is no world but heaven, speared in the atlas air:
As a ground once traveled is forgotten, then dissolves
With the thought of it. We need not fear this leaving, it is clear.
But must the mind always measure its height, and time its progress?
What could bear the body in its treason of the mind? At last the mind,
in dreaming, dreams at rest in mind, like two deadly hooks conjoined.

So reason spreads its blanket in the new bald sun
Below a clear and miniscule past like an ant crushed by a child.
The mind wants universe and it will comb the mind outstepping
Still the skull to grasp at paradise, though slick, a slippery vision held
In an empty chalice on an empty globe. Unseen diameters
Hold Eden bare: this it is; the mind at radiance, when hope has slipped
And vision is the raw thing beating in the meat of day.