Morning Climbs from Root to Stem

Waking should be like slow balloons

mumbling through the cloud cover.

Breach the cirrostratus and its strands

of ancient halo fading, fading away.

But no: the jerk and zap of deep

muscles firing into a brick wall

is all you can hold. Your tongue

is sand. Each grain can taste

its neighbor, but not you. You break

a fingernail before the ascent

and a rib bone after. Who blazed

this trail? No ghosts, no guardians.

The bobolinks mock from the canopy

with their iron heads and intimacy

with the stars. The mountain

doesn’t sigh but your footholds

fade anyway and you are sliding,

not soaring, your mouth a cracked nest.

What rises before you bears no heat

and wears no scars from your scrabble.

An anthill with its earthy buck and flex

doesn’t shape the column of air

that presses down from above. So do

as you must. To wake you push

a leaden mirror upward. You muster

at most the sweat of watching.

Inside the long shadow of your own

design, you do not face the sun.