Height Is the Distance Down

What’s geography? What difference what mountain it is? In the intimacy of this altitude its discolored snowfields overhang half the world. On a knife rim edge-up into whirlpools of sky, feet are no anchor. Gravity sucks at the mind spinning the blood-weighted body head downward. The mountain that had become a known profile on the day’s horizon is a gesture of earth swinging us above falling spaces, above a map of the world. Disturber of the unseen, provoker of the gusts in which we bend struggling against destruction gaping eastward. The wind fails. The breath held. The illusion of death. The resisting shoulder unopposed lurches west in innocent still air, as steep, as deep.