sunrise on katahdin

A solitary heartbeat must suffice, if the soul has made
This blistered yearning to a skin, a blank wind rattling
Dead thoughts from the trees that lift in dim processions
Over fantasy's feet, the feet of a wanderer now still.
Still, one feels the mountain as oneself, meeting the pass
Of lone ridge that yawns and gives to the last face a mere truth
Void of shine; one has just begun to catch oneself, here
In the dark space of things unsaid, eternal hesitations,
When an ancient sun dips back, invidious, to blank night's eyes,
Its dark peaks seen in darkened pools dissolving

Irresolute truths that scatter in the brain.
Each thing's fitfulness is opened to the midnight eye:
Infinities of flickered flames that creep and wander on
This incessant lack of god. It must have once sufficed, the flame;
It must suffice. But in this endless bliss of stones we falter
Consciously, through these mute things loved by feet, and carry on
Extinct desires in object tongues, though the going soul may keep
Its needs concealed. It is audible, the heart of earth
And tendons of earth that strain beneath its vast and unfelt weight...

Perhaps we are born to carry this, an eternity the earth forgets,
a close craft, through some machine upheld in anguished cry
Pandora caught where the path ends sculpting new of earth,
Shaping earthbound things of us. And yet we breathe the sky...
We have climbed too quickly, seen the forest plunging to the floor,
The arduous path discarded like a string and disconsolately
Broken, our bodies stripped and left as we take the air.

The heart grows faint; it knows its altitude. Each earth below seems
As a man who rises and falls, craving a consciousness of sky
And vanishing vainly. We have known these episodes, these atlantic
Places that linger like a loving hand and lift, where we gather
The stones' agony and the pain of air and stand at last
Shaking the cool containments in the peak of the mind.
The highest is too high; we stand a moment; it shatters us
In swift minutia that sweep across a strand, mere exiles gathered,
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, veiled
Forest that hides the soul. The mind unmakes this
Ecstasy of peaks, this mesh of self and miracle.
A vision sealed in a simple sleep, or a constant foot
Need not know dreaming, as if the landscape were a murdered god
The soul climbs, a childless angel pinned to the back of god.

At last there is no world but heaven, speared in the atlas air.
As a country once traveled is forgotten, it dissolves
With the thought of it. It is clear, we may not fear this leaving.
But must the mind always mark its height, its progress in time?
The mind in dreaming dreams the mind awake, like a net of hooks
Catching. 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
The skull to grasp at paradise, still, a slick sight held
In an empty handful on an empty globe. These unseen diameters
Hold Eden bare: this it is; the mind at radiance, when hope has fell
And vision, the raw thing beating in the meat of day.