Over there the White Mountains are exploding with sunlight

After the cold and snow everything basks in it, it’s almost too bright

The land is preening, unself-conscious, chest out eyes closed soaking in light and heat hungrily

The land is wearing its million-year robes… its cloaks of time…

Somehow I feel as though I should kneel, or bow

It wears a changing eternity, an eternity of many slow rises and then many slow falls

Many becomings and as many comings apart

The land shines with sharp dignity in some way

To my human eye it seems more fragile than it used to be

As the roads are cut and mountain sides are hewn and trees are leveled

But eternity absolves all this emotional detail

Eternity is not a fragile process

And we are not so separate

Our destruction not so unique

As the faces of other destructions.

And not even our hearts so unique as to be the only hearts that’ve felt it

As we may esteem to think

Those White Mountains over there-

Their forests look so sparse I feel I could count the trees – but it’s not true

I watch this glowing anonymous terrain in the distance

These unnamed ripples of earth known most by jack rabbits and deer, coyotes and mice

I imagine that over there there are forests like these I am in here; spacious and robust

Mostly left alone except for the roving bands of firewood poachers

Who stay close to the roads

I imagine it’s warm over there (it’s not)

I imagine there is only but a slight breeze (or maybe none at all)

Here there is ice sliding off my tarp and I dare to find something as bright