For millions of years you've loomed above us,
even when we were underwater. So little you've changed
and so gradually compared to our valley, which has
been tilled and planted, plotted, gridded, built up,
wired, lit, and filled with people, cars, and twinkling lights
until your white summit must become disoriented
and wonder which way is up. Five nights a week,
I emerge from one of those little boxes surrounded
by its sentinels of light, and I almost always glance
your way, however briefly. It's just a habit. But so many times,
after I've turned back to car or phone or feet, you
make me look again. Take tonight, for example.
This morning's snow never got a foothold on the streets;
it had melted from the grass by early afternoon,
but your slopes all the way down to your foothills
stayed white, contoured with black rocks, and uncannily
illuminated by a falling sun throwing its beams around heavy
cloud cover to light you up. Though I've seen you
white with snow a thousand times, tonight was just
a little bit different. A thousand times I've looked
at you white with winter, or green with summer life,
or aflame with red, yellow, and orange leaves as
autumn creeps down your slopes toward this valley.
I've seen you bright with the full sun burning your
western face, or once, palely glowing with faint
moonlight, barely delineated from the still dark pre-dawn
east. Beneath the rising sun and the rising moon
or pinked by the sunset--never do you look quite
the same as the time before. And that's just what I need
as I shuffle from office to car, or car to office:
I need you to make me look, and then look again.
