Sand on Timberline

Sand. This is the sand eruptions left

millennia or merely centuries ago. A thousand lifetimes.

This is not granite. No little lakes, rockbound, no walls

of pink-white stone, no bent-tip snags

of juniper or whitebark pine—only

the high volcanic sand. Oh, it is beautiful,

snowcapped, and when the winter flurries fly

along the trailside sunlit amid spruce, brings hope,

remembrance of my once-place; even in this

drying summer’s end this far peak shimmers

sunset’s joy. Yet now right here between

two pines—so different from my own—I peer

upon steep downslopes slagged

in shaggy torn formations, strewn

with sand.

With sand,

not granite basins’ grass-edged

blue-green gold-sparked lakes.

And though a hundred voices speak around me

praising our lone, graceful peak’s high beauty

in a thousand languages and smiles,

here between the logs of this historic,

internationally-famous lodge, cars in the lots,

anxious for thick pastrami sandwiches

on buttery toast,

we step in sand.

Here is not home.

Yet I’d be silly to condemn

this wild, white, lilac-clouded glory

for the choices I have made

—or blame a mountain or a life because

its blessings are its own.

Here in this New Year now, instead, I praise,

as we shall praise,

the blessings and the source

of here and there and all our days.