Taking to the Hills

If walking, like wine, only abets a sad mood let’s try it, I said, and I did: over these hills that have never known sorrow no thoughtful moon passes. Dig until a hill is level, and unearth only earth. Take pride in knowing the chemical makeup of rain, the sum total of harmful vapors in any sunset. For if you must drag in the old lines about suicidal willows, star’s stacked for or against you, you clutter a limitless, soaring landscape with your own baggage. Night of love, day of omens of night, great mountain of realized hopes, valley where bitter winds blow the dispossessed into raving lunatics— what are they but shady projections of passing whims, vastly oversimplified versions of something infinitely greater? This vision before you is nothing but a triad of trees, hills, river, steadfast and eternal. But soon you start to feel restless and when, setting out to take a roll of photos, you note the disturbing absence of a road, your suavity crumbles: you deafen the sky and serenade the moon, fall prostrate before pines saying oh, come back, spirit of the place which, lifeless without you, blossoms into something sumptuously more than mediating madness; come back, massive oaks that await our coming; to carve initials is to be truly human; the days are dappled with our passions, the mountains rise and fall with our glories and follies.