The hills fall down in blue, an undulant
Perspective, sky and trees that touch each other
As shadows touch the living things that cast them.
But which thing is the thing, and which the shadow?
From where I’m standing—here—this table rock
Scrubbed clean by wind and rain—it’s hard to tell
Where substance ends and likenesses begin.
Across the gorge, a water-laden stormfront
Unleashes rain. Or else that’s stone I’m seeing,
A line of balds, not clouds, that raise themselves
To meet the clouds. I’ve hiked this way before.
I’ve stood here looking out to where the hidden
River chafes through rock. Beneath my feet:
A peak that someone thought recalled a hawk’s
Life-gutting beak, or else the folding knife
Named for it. All we know is made of metaphor.
This planing wind becomes a constant noise
Inside my head, a sound like tearing paper,
Or like a dry field gushing up in flame,
As though the world were ending, as though what
I stood here looking at were not blue hills
But clouds, with angels and the Son of Man,
As though this were a vision, not mere seeing.
Though I believe in things outside myself,
A whole reality composed by one
Great thinker, still my human eyes arrange
The stone, the tree, the line where land meets sky.
My eyes pass on those shapes to be translated
Into a human language: this and that.
When I look down, bare quartzite, shelved with lichen,
Thrusts up its layered, weather-beveled edges
Like more gray lichen. Grasses clump and seam
Where windblown sediment has settled. Here
And there, a rain-filled rock pool like an eye
Shines as though it saw the sky it holds.