Buried on a Mountain

the elephant with its trunk in the waves
and a cliff with a leg of vertical hardness
both trumpeted
as i watched the Red Tail hawks catapult
together into overhead thermals, heading toward distant smoke
before disappearing
into the flooding sound of a nearby river.
a friend's torso and tiny head blocked my view of this shore,
but from where i sat in my left-bank hideaway,
i could hear her laughter
when she suddenly slid down a slippery slope,
taking snapshots of fallen leaves as she passed,
grabbing for anything that might help to slow her descent
toward the parallel steel tracks
once part of a transportation system which included slow canal barges and fast-burning coal.
she spent less time on her feet than other well-off Swedish ladies,
none of whom she cared much for,
nor paid any attention to.
and when we walked together, our favorite destinations were our quest for
privacy, spending time, counting change, searching for different lights by which
to read and write,
sometimes even studying if it would be possible to fly on the weekends,
looking for bluer than blue and truer than true.
the cliff, meanwhile, pointed its sharp finger at the sky and we went there, leaving a
dead raccoon at the foot of a distraught tree, off the trail where the
elephants would never come to visit.
and a glass of wine or a cold beer, but never a cigarette.