Being from the lowlands,
I didn’t see mountains
until I was sixteen, woke up
in the passenger seat
under violet Alpine crags
as if driving into illustrated pages
of a geography textbook
or coffee-table travel magazine:
a homeopathic dose of disbelief.
Still something uncanny’s to be made
of roads which climb from suburbs
through forests secluding fugitive stories
to the last point tarmac reaches
and beyond watery refrozen melts
the snowfields proper open:
after first demanding redefinition
words slowly diminish like the oxygen –
until here, and not even above the tree line,
they can be let go, left to their own devices.
