Night falls.

 Stars climb over the ridge
 holding luminous heads
 high into the darkness—
 clambering ants intent only on their ascent
 oblivious to the solitary glow
 of waxing moon
 commanding western horizon.
 
 Steep avalanche path
 I scrambled up in twilight, reaching 
 its gurgling mouth of water
 waist–high cow parsnip meadow at my feet
 green tops of forest
 crawling over raw flanks of peaks . . . 
 all gone now.
 
 In their stead
 one broken shard of obsidian-horizon
 winds scrapping at the valleys
 the curlew footprint of moonlight 
 on mottled 
 sand–bars of cloud
 brighter, more insistent
 the clambering stars.
 
 A shudder passes
 through me, alone in this
 unyielding—
 as close to twig
 cloud, deer imagined 
 in the darkness, to quartz
 as to my humanity.
 
 Death and life
 make no difference
 for wind 
 rubbing skin to skin
 on the night earth
 for star or forest... 
 or hemlock sapling
 propped 
 against rock–fall boulder.
 

 9 July 1992 
 Rattlesnake Creek
Pasayten Wilderness
North Cascade

In the summer of ’92 I made a road trip to visit friends in the ‘greater west,’ stopping at Bend, Oregon, Missoula, Montana, and Lopez Island, Washington. Along the way, I ventured into various out of the way places, including this one-night foray into the Pasayten, close to the Canadian border.