(George Oppen)

The mountain’s grey float
metaphysical curtain rising
The mountain’s heavenly apartments
The mountain’s
  Anhui Provinceness
There, see people bent at the waist so high
pulling brome
The mountain is a wet-brown armored horse
turning its head
The mountain rises and sleeps backward
into a cloud-captured sun
The mountain in performance
in the suit of a spectacle name
The mountain refuses, it
is not terraced for tea-planting
or ivy bed or bamboo
The mountain ȾEXEN
The mountain      deer, their
smart, spherical, occult beds
The mountain’s nursery
of names
your own too at the piney milk
The mountain        snowberry
(step back, cadaver fruit)
The mountain      yellow, blue and dun rock
The mountain’s bullion
of waiting
stamped with grape-clustered un-names
before-names
Mountain cleaving

The cliff is a tongue
and what it says you receive at your own
tongue’s unkenable root
The path you are on, its substance, be confident it
is completely deniable
The mountain’s bushy fern
coat
The mountain all that can be
plausibly denied
heaped
The mountain do not talk of it
Do not seek it or ask
of it a word
The mountain’s updraft
height pulls
your hair
The mountain in gorges
the mountain   hummingbirds’ final cause
the mountain in oak islands
The mountain    forbs
and moss around rock
creating a painted eye
which looks at Val Plumwood
    where she,
seal flash, thought and appeared
water now seaming over       Or Gillian Rose
The mountain   ginger ferns
blue-eyed grass
Lurking, certain, simple
reckless and admirable camas bulbs
hold steeped in ground
The mountain’s breast to the sea

Soak this in water, alder leaf
stained water and pocket the remains under turf where oaks slanting cliffward
lay their tops on a small plateau.

Photograph © Dominic Alves