Mountain Manuscript

27 October 2012, New Providence

They look lonely here, strangers in a strange land, - huge

blocks, angular mountain chips, the largest twenty or thirty feet

in diameter, the chips that Nature has made in modeling her

landscapes, fashioning the forms of her mountains and valleys.

And with what tool were they quarried and carried?

~ John Muir, excerpt p. 63 My First Summer in the Sierra

Considering boulders abandonned in meadows

think of massive mountain chips striated and scored

Consider the curious agents of ice that moved tons

of granite then lowered them to their final repose

amid singing streams of champagne melt water

and nameless tributaries to unnamed creeks