There is a mountain asleep in Idaho.

Its name known only to wild beasts.

​

Twice a day ponderosa shadows lengthen

like a carpenter’s ruler to inspect what is.

​

Its veins are clotted with trout, so fathers and sons

follow fault lines to heaven with fly rods in hand.

​

This town at its feet has a story etched in

hillsides clothed in clouds and avalanches.

​

Elk browse the burn scar that soaked the sun red.

Our windows forced shut for a week in August.

​

Suffocating behind glass we watched the blaze

dance on every bluff.  We made love in its shadows.

​

Raptors and our livelihood perch on every precipice.

All of its stones remember a millennium of rain.

​

Soaking the soil below for summer wheat

harvested in cool mornings.  Dew still sticky.

​

In its shadow, boys lie and play baseball.

Old men watch and judge.  Girls in white sage

​

dance in perfect rhythm to the drum beat

of their mothers.  We are not the first to drink

​

this mountains offering - filtered through

broken basalt and gravel.  We will be buried

​

next to the others, and the mountain

will swallow us all whole.

 

 

Matthew Merson is a high school science teacher in the low country of South Carolina. His other work can be found at Apocalypse Confidential.