1.

Time was large once, roomy
parabolas around long, slow days
that wound through corridors between
anticipations.  You could scream
at the top of your lungs allee allee oxen free
with your friends throwing brown rubber balls
over rooftops, or sit for hours on green lawns
building miniature cairns out of colored bits of glass,
arranging them in orbits like stars.
Pick bunchy little dandelions
and wonder why, always why, the yellow
was magic.  Birthdays, Christmases, and summers
were all coordinates outside Cartesian spaces,
circled on predictable calendars.

2.

Because he’s younger than we, our guide
paces himself and motions us on
as the trail gets steeper, twisting into narrow turns
around glacier-polished rocks with shining
surfaces that reflect blue ice sky.
We say in our meetings, Tuesday nights down below
in the city, that life is moving faster and faster,
and we try to slow it with meditations, Zen,
Yoga, or with the churches of our choice–
or with programmed climbs like this one,
thirteen thousand feet high
in the California White Mountains.
I slip so many times, my feet tripping
in hollows of old snow, that I am afraid
I can’t keep up with the guide, and I am getting tired
and it’s getting harder to breathe
in this altitude.

3.

We reach a spacious clearing where a few knobby
but dignified bristlecone pines bow
from gnarled trunks, pointing their sinewy branches
like bare arms raised to heaven.
As we eat our lunches, our guide tells us
the trees are more than four thousand years old,
and I get a picture in my mind of ancient peoples,
an Abraham or a Gilgamesh, say,
strolling around this earth, breathing this earth’s fine air,
busying about, writing their histories on clay tablets.
I think I see in the striae
on the surface of one of the granite stones
what looks like some kind of cuneiform writing–catenas
of scrawly little wedges and parallel lines: messages
maybe, left for us from the absolute beginning.

4.

Alpine hulsea poke their innocent daisy faces
up through the granite cracks,
new each spring, says the guide–
little sylvan hikers, I think,
drawn to the timeless bristlecones, cozying-up
around the ancient Olamic roots and laying their
yellow colors out in bright circles, even in high places
where they are not always seen: being
there anyway, taking their time–climbing
through their short summers.

She stood there, not tip-toe like Keats
upon his little hill reaching for beauty,

but all atwitter in white shorts and tennies
on my front porch.  So much brightness
she was: her yellow blouse, sun

reflected in her eyes, love
of her new husband on her skin.
They had planted a garden

and, good neighbor, she was bringing
me a basket of bright red
vine-ripened tomatoes—her young bride’s

smile rousing memories
of my own beginnings—summers
at Lake Tahoe, a first kiss:

my Winandermere shores
around which I would wander in youthful
ecstasies, elated, with unbearable

anticipations: fears growing like mountain lichen
in my unconscious—always the sense
there must be endings.  On a television

documentary, a young woman in overalls
spent days painting a mural
on the walls of an empty warehouse, nonstop,

climbing ladders, listening to Gregorian chants,
her fingers bleeding
as she feverishly created images rivaling

the Renaissance masters.  One public showing
only and it was sandblasted away—her art being
a demonstration of transience, of seeing beauty

in its mortality.  But I think Keats saw more—
saw it in the eternal, picked it out of the sky.
And, while he was an old
softie, he must have been dead serious, too,
working his words into all those passionate colors.
It’s only been a few months since the bride    Â
brought me the tomatoes and I feel
an ethereal, boundless thing now
as I remember how she shined that day

and how the chemo
that she would later have to take
didn’t save her—and how, like Keats’ goldfinches

pausing upon their yellow flutterings,
she had stood there on my porch
in all her eager happiness
laying on her colors.