Mount Sinai has its history of the nameless appearing as fire within a bush; and then again, not as a mountain-shaking wind, nor an earthquake and not even a fire, but as a gentle breeze. On Mount Carmel the nameless fell as fire and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench. On another sacred mountain a shining cloud voiced the name of the nameless transfiguring the familiar before our eyes.
Here, on this day, within my eyes, the peaks of the Southern Alps fold up as joined fingers from the bowels of below. They become playgrounds of light in enfolding clouds, hiding and revealing sun and moon and stars. The folds of the mountains muscled in snow and shadow, the soundless depth of fiords, the sheen of cascading waters among alpine trees unfold continuous streams of change.
Countless are the poets who try to exhaust the nature of the scenes I behold yet fall prostrate in silence. Artists too find no further use for their tools and canvases after dashing off incomplete brush strokes in ink.
Shall I now, this day, strain to become at one with the ineffable, plummeting into the depths or soaring into the heavens? Must I too remain at peace with discontent as birds are with wings?
Night after night I strain against the stubborn rigidity of words and the finitude of my imagination as I seek to exhaust the ever-changingness of the day and the night within them.
through the mist
day after day bitten
to the core